Posts by brotherelf

Re: Fallback fault-tolerant

Well yes, synchronous operations will do that.

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

This seems like a good place for my favourite anecdote, where I had to tell a fellow admin "just wait until April 1st to install the software, then it'll work".

… the Python logging of the installer croaked on the "Mär" in the timestamps it generated.

Re: GPL violation

Yes. (Which was exactly how CentOS operated way back when, and which is why CentOS releases trailed the RHEL counterparts by months – not only did you need a working build farm, but you also needed to at least take a cursory glance at many, and replace some, packages.)

Re: Exactly how many API calls are they making?

So remind me again why these apps do not let/make the user provide their own API token?

My bank's fraud detection mechanisms are a much more legitimate reason than, say, ElReg's Google Ads IMO, but YMMV.

Re: This whole "green" thing is getting sillier and sillier.

Recently a friend from the New England area proudly spread the word about a newly built residential building that has battery-only backup, no diesel.

(Mind you, same friend didn't seem too worried about going to Singapore to watch the F1 Grand Prix.)

Re: AutoPatch: something like ...

Go on, use systemd-timers instead :-/

(I'm surprised they don't accept RFC5445 "iCalendar" for the events.)

But yeah, the semantics of cron are one of the weird corners of the toolchest, along with the output format of at being invalid input format for at.

"Nobody sues gutenberg.org after all."

I beg to differ. gutenberg.org was geoblocked from Germany between 2018 and 2021 for copyright infringement of works of Thomas Mann (and others).

(In the interest of clarity: AIUI they felt they should block their entire catalogue instead of just the works the court had ordered them to. Also, since it was only their organization, the mirrors still remained available for several months.)

Re: How shit is your grasp of value....

Yeah, not sure why Simon thought so.

Re: Physical Methods Trump Signs in Any Language

I wonder if there's a market for plugs and wire ends that look dodgy. Like, "I can see bare copper, I better not touch this, it might electrocute me" dodgy.

Re: gamification?

It is a bit "we as a community don't have to make you feel appreciated for your contributions, we have automated that", innit?

They do it because starving to death next week is better than starving to death today.

Much easier to let these people develop those future products at their own risk now and buy out the startup once successful, now that their personal professional networks still reach heavily into the mothership. HHOS.

As much as I'd like to see that, I consider it perfectly plausible that a shrink-wrapped phone's batteries are "nominally empty" (beyond a factory QC test charge) by design, if only because they have been through some sort of shipping process, which may have different regulations for charged and uncharged Li-Pos/Li-Ions.

I'm pretty sure my last phone was uncharged, as were my last couple of laptops, as were the smartwatch and the gaming console. Not 100% sure about the e-reader.

Re: I don't understand the suggestion...

I guess it's alluding to a sort of BitTorrent-ish thing, where you would use some Web3.0 distributed decentralized filesystem. Even the up/down ratio thing finds itself again as storage donated vs used.

Re: The "poor" victims of piracy

Yes, but does that session musician actually get a cut or were they given a flat fee cheque for the X hours they actually worked and then sent on their merry way?

Re: You know you're old when...

There's probably a dozen "maker" projects to build your own with an Arduino of some sorts, but to be quite honest, I'd never give anything that has been touched by my soldering iron control over more than 5W or so, and USB cup warmers notwithstanding, that won't brew you tea.

Re: I can see this working

> There is no need to ever check age again, none of us getting younger.

You wish… They'll say the mechanism has to be robust against lost/stolen credentials.

Re: Ermmm...

It may be a surprise to you, but "I want different settings on small-screen, low-bandwidth mobile and large-screen, high-bandwidth desktop" is a use-case.

Re: Trigger

This. Shortening a previously-announced lifecycle, and by that much, was the deal-breaker for us. Fortunately, we only had approx. two machines on generation 8 at that point.

Re: Personalised Ads

Country identified. I suspect the meningococcal vax ads are an effect of the MiniHealth just throwing money into the ad slot machine and not specifying target audiences, so you get it if you're otherwise boring enough that sports clothes manufacturers won't bid high enough for the ad spot.

Weirdest ads I've seen were: the candidate for mayor from the next town over, "find a vax near you" ads for a country that's not even on the right continent, and a one-hour DJ set. Seriously.

Re: Occasionally, you get a straight answer

Germany might have a freshly-dismissed admiral for you.

Re: "Faster horses"

This. With all the many many flaws you can point out about the judicial system of many many countries, they mostly in their intent want to do better than "liberty and justice for whoever has 51% of processing power".

Technically that is already the case. The current wording around working from home vs. teleworking vs. working from a home office is very carefully crafted so they don't have to send H&S to check whether window glare reflects on your screen and whether your chair meets ergonomic requirements etc., not to mention things like "can you lock away the computer or otherwise ascertain your kid doesn't install their virus-ridden pirated copy of Doom on the device you're handling business matters on".

Re: WTF is anyone paying?

The decrypt process might be better tested than the restore process, though. (What, cynical, me?)

Re: "Less than 5 per cent of lithium-ion batteries are recycled today"

I guess at some point they will be too run-down even for home-wall use? (And even if that point is n years into the future, if you expect to need n years to get recycling tech to usefully work, you better start now. Also, competitive strangvantage.)

Me, I'll be over here humming "reduce, reuse, recycle", in that order.