* Posts by veti

4483 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2010

Feds charge two men with claiming ownership of others' songs to steal YouTube royalty payments

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Re: YouTube copyright enforcement: extra judicial and surely illegal?

Patents are not even remotely similar to copyright.

Dev loses copyright appeal over forensic software after judges rule suite was owned by his employer

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Re: Good luck to my employer!

That's why the best programmers make their money in maintenance, not development.

Most software gets developed and used for a brief period in exactly one environment, where it just happens to "work" (for values of work that mean "do something that someone happens to want done at that time"), and then break as soon as something about the environment or the task changes. Something like 93% of it then gets abandoned and replaced with something new, whether better or worse at this particular task, for the new environment.

The other 7% gets painstakingly updated and transferrred to the new environment. That's a painstaking and expensive process, which is why it's only used on a small minority of items.

A smarter alternative to password recognition could be right in front of us: Unique, invisible, maybe even deadly

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Re: Black week season

"Black Friday" is the Friday that falls two days before Easter Day. Anything else is an irreligious, illiterate, innumerate, inconsiderate, inconsistent, inappropriate... err, misappropriation, which is exactly what you'd expect from those thugs in marketing.

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me... a coding puzzle and it's a doozy

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Followed the link, but I can't see anything that looks like a puzzle. Is the challenge to work out wtf that page is saying?

UK intel chief says MI6 must outsource innovation – and James Bond's in-house 'Q' is nonsense

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Re: Brinit

Spent 40 years trying that. What's your suggestion for doing it better?

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Are you saying that because our dog is incontinent, we should just ignore the cat?

Smart things are so dumb because they take after their makers. Let's fix that

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Re: "Server error 500"

"The server isn't responding properly. This is likely to be a high profile issue that the relevant people are already aware of and are working to fix as quickly as possible. If you can afford to wait an hour or so, it may clear up in that timeframe. Otherwise you can try calling this number and asking them about it."

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The problem is that developers don't like to think about failure modes. It's hard enough (they reckon) to get the bloody thing to work under ideal conditions. If they started affirmatively cataloguing all the ways it can go wrong, someone might tell them to fix some of them.

And they're long past fed up with this project and really want to declare victory and move on to the next shiny.

Their managers mostly feel the same way. And senior management, like sales and finance, just wants to ship a product. Any product is better than none.

Nobody in this whole stack is motivated to make sure failure modes can be correctly identified or diagnosed, let alone described to the poor users.

Sweden asks EU to ban Bitcoin mining because while hydroelectric power is cheap, they need it for other stuff

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You are misreading the code. You're falling into the trap of reading "plebs" as "ordinary people", rather than "well resourced layabouts".

Cryptocurrency has no plausible use cases for most of us, but it's great for the handful of people who adopted it early or have stupid resources to put into it. Those people will continue to try to sell it based on advantages that are imaginary (such as limited supply), irrelevant (such as political independence - from the state, you're still wholly dependent on a whole structure over which you have even less control), or both (such as anonymity).

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Re: Off topic: Heat Pumps vs Gas Boilers

Heating radiators to 30° would indeed be pointless. Heating *air* to 25° and simply pumping it into the space, however, works really well. Why mess about with radiators at all?

BOFH: What if International Bad Actors designed the vaccine to make us watch more Steven Seagal movies?

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Re: Loonies are reading this

Fnord.

You forced me to use this fancypants app and now you're asking for a printout?

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Popcorn

The flagrant Ignobel Prize-fishing research you linked to specifically calls out queuing as an experience that *can* be enhanced by popcorn.

The time to avoid it is when you're watching something that's actually entertaining. As a rule of thumb, if you forgot to eat the popcorn, chances are the movie was pretty good.

Robotaxis freed to charge across 60km2 of Beijing

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Re: will run from 07:00 to 22:00

Charging, cleaning and maintenance take time. And maybe the Chinese govt doesn't want to encourage its citizens to stay out late.

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Re: "pick-up and drop-off points"

It travels on request rather than on schedule, you get a private seat, and I'm guessing there are a lot of drop off points. In principle there could be one for each building.

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Re: Pricing.

So you're saying all that software development, integration and testing should be free?

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Re: I would take whats more convenient tbh

I suspect the lifeless multinational will have a decently functional lost property office.

When I lost my Nintendo DS in a taxi in Sydney, I spent hours trying to get it back but the driver and the company denied all knowledge. Humans can be nice, but it's not a universal law. At least robots will probably be honest.

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Well, for the past century or so the US has been in the lead of basically everything. That's not the case any more, the Chinese have caught up in some fields.

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Not sure how robo drivers are going to make that any better...

Rust dust-up as entire moderation team resigns. Why? They won't really say

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Re: The Rust Foundation statement

What change?

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Re: If it's important enough to resign

The core team is supposed to be in charge, that's fine. But just because you're in charge, that doesn't mean you're above the rules. A lot of people have died by not understanding that basic law of politics. (See Charles I of England, for instance.)

So there needs to be some kind of mechanism for addressing alleged rule breaches by the core team, or at least by individual members of that team. That's what is missing.

Russia's orbital insanity is almost beyond redemption – but there's space for improvement

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Re: Have to wonder

"Act of war" is one of those terms that sounds legalistic, but doesn't actually have any real definition.

In practice the usage is simple. If you want to start a war, you say that (something the other party has done or is doing) "was an act of war", and therefore you're now at war. It's not the act that's significant, it's the description of the act. If you don't want to start a war, you simply don't use that phrase.

Lawsuit accusing Robinhood and Citadel Securities of colluding to stop GameStop shares from skyrocketing thrown out by judge

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Gross profit means nothing. The actual accounts show that the company has been steadily losing money - by the old fashioned definition where you deduct costs before announcing "profit" - since well before the pandemic.

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Re: What's the problem?

Openly carrying a gun into a riot - is just fucking stupid. Of all the people now feting Rittenhouse as a hero, I'd like to ask them - would you encourage your kids to do that?

But, apparently, state law protects people who do that kind of thing.

What I'd like to see is a parallel case where one of the mob successfully hit and killed the lunatic with the gun. Because as far as I can see, they could use exactly the same defence in law.

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It's hard to argue that GameStop is still being widely shorted, but the price is still lower than it was when Robinhood suspended it. So anyone buying at that time would have lost money. As it is, the people who really lost money - apart from the funds that were invested in the shorts - were those who sold in the price crash that followed Robinhood's intervention. And nobody forced them to do that.

GameStop now is obviously overvalued for a company with nothing resembling a survivable business plan. Which suggests to me that the successful stock manipulation has been the concerted effort to extract money from gullible and/or sentimental small investors by talking the stock up.

Amazon tells folks it will stop accepting UK Visa credit cards via weird empty email

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Re: Curious...

Well, then if you want to keep using it for Amazon, why not get one issued in your country of residence)

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Re: Curious...

Since the story very specifically singles out "Visa cards issued in the UK", I guess you'll be fine.

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Yep, there certainly are. I talk to one of them on a weekly basis.

Hint, not everything is about money.

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Trollface

Re: re: Amazon informs users it will stop accepting UK Visa credit cards via weird empty email

Yes, because they're totally not colluding.

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Re: It appears we are just behind Australia

Why thankful? That's what gives the card providers the power they have.

If retailers were able to pass on their costs appropriately, it'd apply at least a little discipline to them.

The inside story of ransomware repeatedly masquerading as a popular JS library for Roblox gamers

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Re: Proactive? Absolutely not.

I'm pretty sure that hosting scammers and bad actors free speech is a core part of Discord's business plan. They certainly try to present themselves as a relaxed and un-policed environment.

He called himself the King of Fraud. Now this bot lord will reign in prison for years

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Re: Wasted advertising

Cars and banks are things that most people buy infrequently, and they represent major commitments, so it's important to get them right. When buying such a thing, name recognition is hugely important because it reassures the customer that this is a serious company that's not likely to disappear next week.

The same dynamic doesn't apply to everything, but it's an element across a surprisingly wide range.

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Re: Ads ? Paid features ?

Paid features will also go through some level of editorial screening, or at least be subject to editorial veto. Ads don't.

The Ministry of Silly Printing: But I don't want my golf club correspondence to say 'UNCLASSIFIED' at the bottom

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Re: Back in the early 90's

McMann & Tate. This I know because I once had a massive crush on Elizabeth Montgomery.

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Re: Back in the early 90's

Microsoft has always been a follower, not a leader, in jargon. All their products to this day have the most maddeningly generic names imaginable. Think Word, Teams etc.

"Windows" was a generic industry term before Microsoft began turning it into a trademark. Interestingly, this doesn't affect the validity of the trademark.

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Re: Amateur Opera Society Newsletter

That would be a bass act.

BOFH: You drive me crazy... and I can't help myself

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Re: I need that resolve...

Your congresspeople, as well as being monumental cowards, have absolutely no discernable sense of humour between the lot of them. Nor do the ridiculous numbers of police and other security-related goons employed to make sure no-one gets near them.

You have been warned.

Zuck didn't invent the metaverse, but he's started a fight to control it

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Re: *'anchorite?

He can have as much company as he can make. No problem with that.

AI algorithms can help erase bright streaks of internet satellites – but they cannot save astronomy

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Re: This is worse than it sounds.

I don't know where you live, but my internet usually fails at least a couple of times a week.

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Re: near miss meteors

Yeah, lots of people talk about this.

But oddly enough, the people launching and maintaining the satellites don't care. The reason being, they know how big space is. They've actually done the maths.

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Require anyone planning to maintain more than 1000 communication satellites to also sponsor one orbital telescope for the same period.

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Re: you do it to yourself, just you/You and no one else

Uh huh. What selection process do you think is going to be used to pick this 0.01%, and what are your chances of being included?

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Undersea cables are pretty extensive, though. Niue makes Guam look like a humming metropolis, and it's way more remote, but even it has its own cable connection.

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Just because one of them lets fly a bit of shrapnel, doesn't mean they all immediately explode. I think you may be underestimating how easy it is to miss a target the size of a satellite at a range of several hundred kilometers.

Let's imagine a solar panel flies off in a random direction. The area of the orbital plane at 600 km is approximately 2.5 billion km2. 40,000 satellites, each filling about 40m2, will fill about 6.4e-10 of that space. That's the chance,per orbit, of an accidental collision, and that's assuming the debris flies off in exactly that orbital plane. If we allow for a bit of variation in orbital radius, it rapidly becomes way less likely.

NASA advised to study up on what open source, free software, and permissive licenses actually mean

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Re: What free means

All of the above can certainly be argued, but which would a court actually consider important?

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That law could pose quite a problem for NASA. If anything they publish automatically becomes public domain, then they can't comply with most "open source" licenses, since these unanimously assume that the code creator holds on to the copyright.

One click, one goal, one mission: To get a one-touch flush solution

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Trollface

Re: Posting AC because its recent stuff

That's to discourage you from spending too long on the khazi. "Every 23 minutes", as described in the article, is by design - that's the absolute limit for a toilet break as specified by EU directives.

Reg reader returns Samsung TV after finding giant ads splattered everywhere

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Re: Opted out

We haven't abandoned TV, but I have been careful never to let it connect itself to the internet. If I want to view internet content on it, that's what HDMI cables are for.

The number of devices that know the password to my home wifi is already quite enough thank you.

Waterfox: A Firefox fork that could teach Mozilla a lesson

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I didn't mind the interface change in Australis. What put me off it was the loss of core functionality. I'm not talking about extensions, I'm talking about whole pages that simply refused to render. They would, e.g., get stuck while loading some frame, and the central two-thirds of the page simply remained blank.

A couple of releases later they seemed to have fixed that, but why did it ever ship in the first place?

Latest Loongson chip is another step in China's long road to semiconductor freedom

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Re: MIPS and RISC-V

It was the US's decision to refuse exports of high performance Intel chips to China. Seriously, when someone uses a demonstrative pronoun, you should take a moment to read upthread and work out what they're talking about.

To the rest of your rant - sure, keep telling yourself that. Whatever.

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Re: MIPS and RISC-V

That would be a valid point if we were talking about China's decision, but we weren't. That was the US's decision.

There is no issue with being based on other people's architectures. Everything is built on what came before, that's how technology works. The point is that there's nothing that needs to be licensed, so nothing that can be restricted by the whim of some foreign government.

Of course that's of no value to anyone outside China (except possibly in places like Iran that are subject to similar restrictions), but from their own point of view it's still worth crowing about. It's sending a message to the US in particular, that this is one less lever it has over China.