it's imploding yet duplicating

Fortunately things are not as bad over here in Europe, there's still loads of competition. That being said, Ryanair as an ultra low cost carrier specialises in flying from smaller airports to an airport somewhere near somewhere people want to go (I.E. "London" Isle of Skye airport) so for many it is their only option apart from driving a few hours to a major airport.

I doubt they'll try this as EU and UK consumer laws will have some rather strong things to say about it. O'Leary has a history of saying outlandish things to get free publicity in the press. Things like charging for lavatory use or dropping one pilot and training the cabin crew to fly in emergencies.

I too have had the pleasure of flying Cebu Pacific and travelling in the Phils, generally they're not a good example of how to do things and Filipinos, as lovely a people as they are really tend not to do things the easy way.

In Europe, even here in Colombia almost every airline will have automatic check in machines with manned desks as a backup in case the machines fail. 99 times out of 100 it makes things faster and easier as well as allowing for more people to check in simultaneously.

I didn't realise how much until I had the misfortune to fly on the same day as the Collins Aerospace cyber attack. Qatar Airways had to check in 2 full 777-300s manually which meant both flights were delayed (mine by 3 hours) which meant a great many people including me missed their connection. I've no doubt that Qatar would have pulled in every warm body they could to help on that day too.

Ryanair's O'Leary is well known for making outlandish statements that never come true in order to get his name and his airline plastered all over the news and generate faux outrage for free publicity. Would bet this is just another such stunt.

Almost every airline that lets you check in online also sends you a PDF that you can print out. I'd be very surprised if this was not already industry standard if not law in Europe. Even if they get rid of printers at the airport I suspect this system will remain for people without smartphones or those who simply want a paper copy with the boarding QR code on it.

Finally I strongly suspect that if they actually did try to force people to download their shitty app... the EU will step in and say nein, non, no y fuck off in 3... 2...

For an additional fee.

THAT, I believe, is the main part of this change. Ryan Air already doesn't even break even on the pure ticket cost. It's the horrendous extra fees that make it profitable.

Which cost, exactly?

We are speaking about paper boarding passes the customers themselves print. The gates read the barcode and don't care if it's on paper or a phone screen.

So which cost, exactly?

That's putting it mildly.

Smartphones can crash, run out of battery or any number of problems. On important trips I usually have a paper boarding pass with me as a backup. Only needed it once, but I'm just one person with fairly normal travel amounts. Multiplied over the number of people flying Ryan Air, statistically speaking this happens constantly.

Frankly speaking, I think it's a gimmick to milk the customers for more money. Someone at Ryan Air has certainly done the calculation, estimated how many people can't access their boarding pass at the gate for whatever reason, and how much additional money they can make by forcing all these people to pay the additional fee for having it printed.

The company standard for servers is RedHat 10. RedHat 10 does not support 32 bit applications.

The legacy app is running happily on RedHat 9.

...laura

I support a legacy app that was written back in the 1990s. It originally ran under VxWorks with custom hardware, variously 68k and PowerPC.

The first port I did was to Solaris. No byte-order issues and I kept the 32 bit ABI. It worked well.

When the Powers That Be decided to ditch Sun hardware and Solaris in favour of x86 and Linux I ported it to Linux. Parts of the code weren't byte-order clean, but I worked through them. The code is heavily 32 bit dependent and I never did create a viable 64 bit version (I tried, believe me...), so it runs on our last 32 bit server in the data center. The service it supports is slowly dying so there's no business case to spend any more time or money on it. If the business case existed I'd apply what I've learned in the meantime and rewrite it from scratch anyway.

The Linux port was initially unstable. It would run for a random time, hours to weeks, then two threads would deadlock. After a couple of years of letting it run and watching it crash I traced the deadlock to an "optimization" that didn't actually do anything, with an if statement that had about a one in a trillion chance of going the wrong way. I removed the optimization and the application has been running fine ever since.

...laura

Uh uh. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking 'Does this inject a security flaw or hazard?' Now to tell you the truth, I've forgotten myself in all decades just how insecure Microsoft software is. But being this is a Linux kernel, the most powerful kernel in the world, and will blow Microsoft's kernel clean off the rack, you've gotta ask yourself a question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya?

LoB

What goes out to 4Chan: It's all about being able to use ActiveX in the Linux kernel so that WSL will have better security and reliability.

LoB

Mostly true but not entirely. For the moment at least there are still applications such as airplanes where fossil fuels have no reasonable alternative. But yes, a large number of things that we currently power by burning long-dead dinosaurs could just as well work with other sources of energy.

And yeah, I think the whole world looks at the Middle East and is thinking: If you all so much want to kill each other, why don't we just step back and let you?

Some born with golden spoon in mouth boy is learning the expensive way that no, money can NOT buy everything. The laws of physics don't care how rich you are or how much money you throw at them. :-)

Oh my poor innocent sweet summer consumer...

You actually think HR has anything to do with helping workers. No, misguided one

No, no, no.

HR exists to protect the company _from_ it's employees. If US companies are expanding their HR, then they're preparing for war with their own employees.

Science? Really? There's a lot of soft-brained, unscientific and technophilic pseudo-religion in the article.

Let's work with the argument's load-bearing phrase, "exploration is an intrinsic part of the human spirit."

There are so many things to criticise in that single statement of bias. Suffice it to say there's a good case to be made that "provincial domesticity and tribalism are prevalent inherited traits in humans", without emotional appeals to a "spirit" not in evidence.