Posts by Graham Dawson

Re: Applying patches .... please wait

Obviously it's wherever Beagle 2 crash-landed.

Re: Applying patches .... please wait

I'd lay good odds they're using something like QNX rather than Linux. If it is Linux, it'll be an absolutely bare-bones kernel with a custom set of core utils. Or maybe they're using busybox. That'd be a laugh.

Re: @Graham Dawson - Nothing there...

It can be our future in the same way that buried bones are the future of us all, but we still study the bones of our ancestors to understand history. Mars is a planetary fossil. It preserves things from then by being relatively static in the meantime.

Re: Nothing there...

The bit is getting old, mate.

Studying the "nothing but rocks" of Mars gives us an insight into processes that took place on earth but are no longer observable due to differences in atmospheric composition. There are geological structures on Mars that are impossible to observe here, because here they would be chemically destroyed by the ongoing presence of liquid water, whereas there they can sit out in the open without damage. By studying that, we can gain a better understanding of the history of our own planet's history.

Re: No TV

but we do have Brexit, a deadly pandemic, global warming, riots in Belfast, warfare and starvation in Yemen, and lots of other really important things to think about (not to mention my vacuum cleaner packing up), so hopefully the news outlets will cover other important items too, eventually.

They'll all still be around next week and likely won't have changed much in the meantime.

Re: Bad greek

Or does it?

Re: Undermining the benefits of an immutable filesystem?

Except it's real. The link to the official release news was right in the article, with its last commit on the 30th, and this particular part of the release was being touted in release-candidates back in February.

Re: Errr but...

I had exactly the same problem this week. New laptop with an ubuntu-based OS, which in most other regards is a very nice machine, but the networking just killed me. I couldn't resolve anything on my lan no matter what I tried. I was at least able to disable resolved and put network manager back in charge of resolv.conf, which is a step in the right direction at least. Now it gets its nameservers from the dhcp lease instead of that convoluted solution to something that was only ever a problem in poettering's mind.

Somewhat related, I had a weird problem with pulseaudio as well. It appears to have found a way to crash my docking station by sending a power down command to the idle sound hardware in it. Another obscure configuration to change. Hooray.

Re: What a relief!

But I already have a picture of the Queen on my wall.

Every morning I walk into my office, genuflect towards it, and say "Good morning, Stephen!"

Except when it mysteriously breaks things and refuses to work until you reboot. It's one of those Poettering Specials.

Re: RE: Master / slave

Offensive! It is now known as the subservient pressure provision cylinder.

I'm pretty sure beer was invented by multiple societies around the same time, much like agriculture. Some semi-nomadic cultures invented beer first and then presumably invented sedentary agriculture in order to secure a more reliable supply of raw materials.

Re: Well you won't find me...

Woden isn't Odin. One of them is the allfather, the other is the father of all. Completely different!

In ten years most of these terms will be verboten. Welcome to the euphemism treadmill.

Re: The problem here isn't the borders, it's the ludicrously anal way that the tax...

It's because we're retained the EU's VAT rules and regulations and are applying them at our border the same way the EU applies them at its border.

Within the customs union, if you were to import goods from a seller in a third country, and the seller hasn't made the appropriate registrations and arrangements to collect VAT on behalf of the EU territory into which they're selling (and very few did), VAT would be applied and collected at the common customs border.

We've retained that portion of the acquis, so now imports from outside the UK have VAT applied at our border. This includes imports from sellers inside the EU, who shouldn't be applying VAT to UK sales, and should be supplying the same paperwork they'd supply to exports (including RMAs) to any other third country.

Our exports to the EU also have VAT and other duties applied at the EU border. Sales outside of the UK's VAT regime don't have UK VAT applied, as has been the norm when selling to places outside of the EU when we were part of it, so anyone selling from the UK to the EU shouldn't be adding VAT to the price.

VAT wasn't part of the trade agreement, which is really more of a framework agreement than an actual trade deal. Some future agreement on VAT might be negotiated within that framework, but I expect it's low down on the priorities.

The point is, we're applying the rules as inherited. Now whether the government will be keen to change those rules is anyone's guess (I'm going out on a limb to predict the only changes they'll make are the ones that they think will bring in more revenue), but blaming the government for the existence of these rules is a bit parochial, given they were originated by the EU and are now being mutually applied, unchanged, by both parties to one another as they would to any other third country.

Re: Punters can "back" one of the projects by pre-ordering it.

It worked for Star Citizen. You can still buy drawings of a spaceships, for lots of money, that they promise to build into the game one day.