Re: "it wanted to pursue a domestic fusion energy strategy"
No Baroness Dido Harding in the mix? Seriously? Or is she going to be put charge of the procurement?
25376 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"do people REALLY want to give up personal privacy JUST TO GO TO WORK EVERY DAY?"
You and I may not want to, but the generations growing up today with smartphones, bluetooth and WiFi always on, apps tracking their every move, smart watches, fitness bands measuring all their vital statistics to send back to base, sharing their running/jogging/cycling habits to the world, running browsers with only the default inbuilt protections, no ad/script blocking etc. Why? Because the DON'T CARE enough to even think about it. If you bother to try to explain it to them, they go all glassy eyed. And as others have already mentioned, in 20-30 years time, where are you gonna get fuel for all those lovingly maintained ICE cars? A very few might be able to produce their own, but good luck with that if you live in a city.
It doesn't even matter whether EVs are the future or not. Having your car "connected" is all you will be able to buy, the choice will only be who you choose to buy from, choose the least worst option. If not for you, your kids and grand kids.
"So yes is should have been done better but so should all the control software for all the little bits that people don't think about. Not every computer is in a nice clean office doing Word Documents or spreadsheets."
Agreed. We regularly are regaled with tales of "the unknown box" on networks that might do "something important", or the "box that does" but can't be physically located. A new build network is probably fully documented. But there are networks out there that started on older technology and just growed and growed.
Not more privacy conscious , just easier to block. An app will ask permission, and then refuse to work if you don't give it permission. A web app or just a website accessed via the browser directly, can be restricted. Consider how many apps ask for many and broad ranging permission outside the scope of strictly necessary but won't work at all if you refuse any of them. As the article said, there's little to no network level blocking available on mobile phones but web browser level blocking is possible.
That's why I feel it's odd to remove it. Almost no maintenance, ie just enough so it still works as the OS environment changes and it's *tiny* compared to the rest of the OS install. So a tiny amount of resource required to stop the bitrot and effectively no extra space saved by removing it
"Since wordpad only reads the newer docx formats I would have thought a plugin architecture to convert whatever to wordpad's internal format (rtf?) would leave the wordpad executable itself alone?"
I agree with your "it's done" statement, but not the above. It IS "done". All it needs is whatever minor tweaking/updates to keep it running on whatever version of Windows is current. It doesn't need access to other file formats, or any other [breaking] updating :-)
"No, it is not as lean as WordPad (which can do the most basic things only). Loading time is quite a bit longer, especially on not-that-new hardware, and it times it can feel a bit sluggish"
Agreed. And despite the authors comment of "That feature set saw it occupy a strange zone", I'd say that WordPad occupied the "perfect zone" of being good enough for many tasks where some basic formatting is required, it's on every Windows box, unlike Office/Word and fits all those cases where NotePad is just too bare bone. I don't use Windows at home any more, but find WordPad very useful when using Windows at work or on a clients site. It's certainly very handy for print out those quick and simple, Very Large Font notices like "Do NOT Touch", "Out Of Use", etc. :-) Likewise, those one or two page documents that might need simple bullet lists or some paragraph headings. Loading up Word or signing into an online word processor feels like massive overkill for those situations. I suppose MSPaint might fill sign-making the gap, but again, that feels like overkill. And most places don't let you install random WordPad replacements from random websites.
And? The blog itself is no more enlightening.
I'd have thought something as critical as sudo being replaced would merit a lot more than just "omits less commonly used features" as a partial explanation of why it's better.
If anyone else is also wondering, one of the links in the blog leads to https://crates.io/crates/sudo-rs, hidden behind the words "first stable release" and is a link to the "read me". I'm disappointed El Reg didn't explain further or at least provide an explanatory link directly to the "read me".
Normally, I'm happy to go off and do my own research on something that interests me, but this one feels like fundamental information that ought to have been in the article and linked blog.
Yes, it's the same on almost all "distance" based searches on the web, whether that be Google, other search engines or, far more commonly, websites own searchs. Almost none of them take geography into account. I live by a river and the nearest crossings are 4 miles down river or 6 miles up river and there's a town centre just across the river. That makes searching for retail locations etc lots of fun since that is, by distance, the nearest town centre being only about half a mile from my house across a 400 metre wide river. Handy if I had a boat, I suppose :-)
"Having said that, I'm a Brit so perhaps adding some American drawl would make them sound more similar?"
Or just travelling a mile or two down the road, in the UK. Accents are blending more these days due to easy communications and national/international tv and radio etc, but not so very long ago, accents varied wildly from village to village and even different parts of town. As for the US, there a areas where they seem to go out of their way to never pronounce the letter H in many words and and other cases where they strongly emphasise the letter H. eg 'erbs and Ve-hicle. Then there's the UK divide over whether it's properly "an 'otel", "an hotel" or "a hotel". Lets not even go near the Scon/Scoane debate :-)
Yes, likewise a Devon based RAC patrol being assigned a job in Orkney, 750 miles and at least one ferry trip away :-)
The story doesn't explicitly state how this happened, but implies it was a Post Code error either in understanding a spoken character string or entering it into the system.
"The notion it exists to solve a problem is nonsense because it does not actually solve the problem, but creates yet another flawed approach."
I considered the notion that US doesn't have an existing system other than Lat/Long, as I note that is sometimes the case when US "tech bros" come up with new standards or systems they plan to sell to the world when the rest of the world already has system in place. But, no, even that is no excuse as the US does have the United States National Grid. Mind you, that only became a standard in 2001, so maybe W3W wasn't aware of it?
Exactly. Anyone with the forethought to install W3W as a location app could just as easily install anything capable of showing GPS based Lat/Long, or OS grid ref, or any local maping co-ordinate system in whatever country they happen to live or be in.
The ONLY thing W3W has going for it IMHO is the marketing and awareness raised in people who might not otherwise be aware of other, pre-existing solutions.
On the downside, it's a profit making "disrupter" that, as per most so-called "disrupters", isn't actually solving a problem, uses proprietary tech and doesn't appear to be amenable to criticism and the consequent fixes as evidenced by their "robust" defence when likely flaws are pointed out to them. If they were really all about doing good and not just making money, they would take constructive criticism on board and evaluate it, not just dismiss it as "unlikely" with no corroborating evidence. That's the typical response of a commercial business.
Or, better yet, implied consent because the Ts&Cs changed since your "read" and ticked them? Personally, I find changes to Ts&Cs are just more "dark patterns" in that they are humungously large and the change announcement invariably just leads you to the entire document. Since you have to tick a box to agree to them, they should be forced to record the exact date and time of that action and then when changes are announced, only show what changed with the option to read the whole thing again if you choose. At least that way you have a little more information by being able to see the changes and not have to memorise a 400 page document so can try to identify the very few but possibly game-changing differences.
I note that the financial services watchdog in the UK has done so in that if there are changes to my banks Ts&Cs, they send a letter/email stating only the changes, marked by paragraph and clause numbers and stating exactly what has changed, so it is possible.
"Man and his livestock are 90% of mammalian landmass. Atmospheric CO2 ppm has gone up 50% since I was at school."
You were at school 10,000+ years ago? mankinds noticeable and measurable impact on the planet barely reaches back 500 years, maybe a 1000 or 2000 in some specific isolated cases. Well done for quoting out of context to make an irrelevant point.
There's always the alleged Baghdad Battery to throw in and liven up the discussion :-)
And depending on who/what you believe, the alleged power generation capabilities of the Ark of the Covenant :-)
Unless the Russians chose their timings correctly in terms of wind direction, Germany mostly gets winds from the west so I expect the fallout from Russian nuclear test bombs to mostly have gone east, not west. There's probably records of wind directions and dates of bomb tests if anyone wants to spend the time checking.
I wonder if in the future it will be a "K-T Boundary" event rather than an "age". After all, they define an "age" as being thousands to millions of years, so defining a new age based on plastics deposition is being incredibly more accurate and precise than any other Age, at least for the start, hopefully for the end, and ideally, a very short time period.
"Geology is not a real science"
Sheldon Lee Cooper, Ph. D., Sc. D. Nobel Prize Winner.
Or, more fully:
Penny : What's wrong with geology?
Sheldon Cooper : Let me put this in a way you'll understand Penny. You remember how you explained to me that the Kardashians aren't real celebrities? Well, geology is the Kardashians of science.
when I asked them to justify, they said "well they have to reset the computer..."
And that is the heart of the matter. Having a computer stop something working because a part failed or wore out of spec is one thing, but having an OEM only process to reset it back to normal operation once the affected part is replaced is the real problem. Often it's because the computer doesn't actually know or check if a part has failed or worn out of spec. It's just assuming that happened based on time and/or usage so "for your safety", they won't allow the user to hit the reset button themselves.
"That does not help to stay in focus. Words against acts, once again, and your acts betray you. Not to mention that this forcing Edge anyway you can is very much like the whiny ex that can't stop phoning you. Pathetic."
"Focus" is the new marketing buzzword. I remember when I was forced to switch to Outlook for work, a year or so ago. After a month or so I realised I was missing a lot of email because MS Outlook defaults to something it calls "Focused Inbox", which meant it was only showing me some emails in the inbox, not all of them. Typical of MS. I never have found out how it "decides" what I need to be "focussed" on and what I am supposed to either ignore or go hunting for, disrupting my "focus" on what my job actually entails. Luckily, at least for now, we can still switch off the "focussed inbox" and make it behave in a rational way.
(1) alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork
(2) alt.destroy.microsoft
Both still exist :-)
And you can still create new groups in the alt. hierarchy
No, and they don't, at least not without using an NZB web based search. Many if not most of the binaries these days are posted using encrypted or obfuscated titles, sometimes scatter gunned across multiple groups such that you need to get an NZB file to automate finding and re-assembling them. Some free NZB search engines will decode and name the posts properly, but mainly you need a paid for one or an invite from someone on an "invite only" search engine. Or so a friend tells me :-)
Searching Usenet? Simple. Subscribe to group, download ALL messages, possibly going back decades then use your client or command line favourite search technique. :-)
(Or just use Google. I think they still have groups.google.com kept up to date)
(Agent is one of a smallish number of apps I still run in a VM as I've simply found nothing I like as much that'll run under Linux (or perhaps because I am too lazy to convert all the killfile rules)
I used to like Agent for similar reasons, but then they changed the interface too much. Almost as bad as the Gnome2/3 debacle! So I switched to Pan and haven't looked back since. But yeah, the rules. Pan has a good and if required, complex rules system to mark/move/kill posts, but it's a bit less intuitive than Agent used to be, for example, and in advanced mode, works almost identically to slrn rules.
My wife suggested using MTV for some background music/noise a while back, so out of curiosity, I switched to MTV. WTF? Where's all the music? It seems like so many specialised cable channels, they start off with a descriptive name and over time re-brand to an initialism and eventually change the actual name to the initialism, dumping not just the original descriptive name, but the entire programme line-up. The M in MTV is just M, not shorthand for Music. Even The SciFi channel became SyFy and now it's more fantasy and horror than SF. Although the converse seems to be true of the Horror channel, which seem to carry a lot of SF :-)
Anyway, getting back on topic, Pan for the win (best free Usenet client out there IMO!)
"I think what crippled Usenet was that the gravity of Internet-based interaction gradually shifted to the Web. For most novice Internet users, the Web became a media-rich one-stop shop for interaction and content consumption, and my guess is that most people these days have never even heard of Usenet."
That and a preponderance for newer Usenet clients to work "on line", and even if they had an offline mode, the offline mode would not be the default, so to a lot of newer users, it was just another online "forum". If posts were deleted from the server, the server went TITSUP or they changed the numbering system for any reason, the users "lost" all the old posts. And then there were the people that used MS Outlook for Usenet, the biggest offender of them all for doing things in it's own "special" way by trying to make Usenet look like email, doing quoting "wrong", not being able to strip sigs etc.