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Comment Re:Gives Ukraine an alternative? (Score 1) 15

alternative to StarLink

There is no alternative now, and there won't be an alternative for years.

Globalstar is far too low bandwidth for Ukraine's needs. Amazon doesn't have the ambition or nerve to risk building anything that approaches Starlink in the kind of time frame that is relevant to the Ukraine conflict, and they don't have the vertically integrated launch platform with the airline-like capacity and reliability of SpaceX to make such ambitions affordable, and they don't have the ambition or nerve to build that either.

Love him or hate him, for better or worse, Musk has the ambition and nerve to do these things. That fact is everything: the essential, exclusive ingredient. And Bezos et al. don't have it. You may wish they did, and regret they do not, but don't kid yourself.

Comment Re:Globalstar is so different (Score 1) 15

The valuation is what mystifies me. Maybe, before Starlink, a constellation of 25 communication satellites was worth a few billion. Maybe $10 billion with IP, lucrative contracts and whatever spectrum they hold. After Starlink?

No. Just no.

Globalstar equity holders have played this one well.

Comment Re:Bad metric kill projects and sometime companies (Score 1) 57

But its not a total failure.

It's supposed to be a benefit: better competitors that aren't governed by shiny-object leadership are supposed to take advantage and punish such clowns. That's the real cost of centralization, IP law and regulatory balkanization: the clowns rely on these to insulate themselves from the wolves that would otherwise end them.

Comment Re:"reversing a position" (Score 1) 63

Makes me think of the "bad faith" trope we see with some frequency from certain folks.

Recently some blowhard Reddit mod(s) went ham on AI in open source, and essentially outlawed discussion of any open source projects that are not purely organic from their little Reddit sandbox. When it was pointed out that this is pretty unworkable since significant open source projects, including Linux, Mesa and others are allowing AI generated code, they backed up. And that's all fine I suppose, except they characterized the response to their stupidity as deliberate "bad faith" misunderstanding of their original announcement. It wasn't that at all; it was exactly what you should expect when get all chesty with the world and can't handle the blowback, but they've adopted the cop-out of calling these self-inflicted episodes as some sort of "bad faith."

I see this often enough now that anytime I see someone claiming "bad faith" I assume I'm dealing with another nasty little shit-bird trying to cry-bully their way.

Comment Nice laptop but .... (Score 1) 63

IMO, people are making too big a deal out of the touchscreen functionality. It's not really a big reason someone would buy this new Macbook Pro. It's simply something Apple said they were finally able to add to a good OLED display without adding weight or thickness to the machine.

I had a Lenovo ThinkBook 14" laptop my workplace issued me that had a touchscreen display, and I basically just forgot it existed on it. That said? It was finally useful in one situation where I had it on a docking station with dual external displays. I configured our VoIP softphone to use the laptop's own display so I could tap to call people from the directory.

This is just the latest, greatest iteration of Maxbook Pro with the latest ARM processor in it and a number of small design improvements. (EG. It has an audio profile now for listening to music with the lid closed on it. That's a feature I'd actually use sometimes and wondered why none of my other laptops ever had it.)

Comment "reversing a position" (Score 1) 63

I've only been paying attention since 1990 but every single time a feature they don't offer "is stupid" until they offer it.

Even when I liked the company this Cluster B behavior always bothered me.

If there's an example of "that's a really nice feature our competitor has but we don't offer it yet" I haven't seen it.

The closest I can think of was offering WebObjects for Solaris. Not sure if that ever shipped or we just had a beta. I bailed from that Healthcare IT team when the CIO pulled funding for two-phase commit among disparate patient medication systems with the rationale "even if medication errors kill someone it'll be cheaper to settle the lawsuits than pay for the license." Enough people left that they outsourced and everybody still hates that replacement system.

I learned too late that MBA's don't care about quality.

Comment Re:vi is the best editor (Score 2) 83

Let them do their thing.

I remember in High School the Camaro guys couldn't stop talking about how their Camaros were better than Mustangs but the Mustang guys never felt the need to denigrate the Camaros.

It's a matter of nature.

unrelated: Tailscale is so fooked today:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.c...

Some people here may need to panic right about now.

Comment Sovereignty vs. Briefcases of Cash (Score 1) 131

The right way to do this is to hire a group of developers and have test volunteers report workflow problems - then FIX them - then iterate. That's the point of choosing an open source solution.

Eventually there would be no problems remaining.

But so many possible scenarios exist that it's impossible to guess what happened here.

PS _NSA_KEY

Comment Re:Don't understand (Score 1) 36

I would assume places felt unsure they'd really get their data back by paying the scammers who locked their files down in the first place.

There are plenty of stories about people who paid the ransoms and never got their data unlocked afterwards.

If someone came along, pretending to be the good guy who could break the lock for you or your business? Wouldn't you prefer to pay THEM, rather than rewarding the criminal who created the problem in the first place?

Comment Not sure this is meaningful? (Score 1) 109

It's at least notable that the plastics industry documented the possibility that microplastics were accumulating in the human body. But with there being such limited knowledge on what harm they do, if any, just by being there? I don't see why this would have sounded any alarms back as far as 1974?

Comparing this to cigarette manufacturers is a little disingenuous, IMO. That's an industry that encountered mounting evidence that smoking was doing harm and even killing people, yet they doubled-down, paying off researchers to try to find as much contrary evidence as possible to deny it.

It seems pretty logical that ANY substance we're exposed to can enter the human body, and many of those substances could stick around in a microscopic scale. The more important question is whether or not it matters from a health perspective. We developed some of our plastics BECAUSE they were inert materials, deemed fairly safe to use in the medical field (surgical tubing and so forth). Maybe that was a big mistake, but most of the concerns I hear voiced right now amount to wild guesses. "Look at the increase in things like obesity, or cancer! Maybe it's the microplastics!" There are MANY other possible causes in play, so jumping to the conclusion microplastics are the next cigarettes is .... unreasonable.

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