In other news today...
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@DogsB I find it hard to imagine a worse company to own a major social network* than Oracle. Oracle makes expensive enterprise products for big faceless corporations. They don't interact with the public. The closest they have to a product for "end users" is Java, which they bought and immediately mishandled so badly that everyone else had to start actively telling users not to install it.
*If you count millions of cringy videos of people dancing as a "social network"
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@anonymous234 said in In other news today...:
I find it hard to imagine a worse company to own a major social network* than Oracle.
I Hate Oracle Club is
everywhere.
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@DogsB I've also read versions where Oracle was only going to handle data processing for US users. But I doubt Trump would be OK with a solution where the app code is still straight from China.
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@PleegWat said in In other news today...:
the app code is still straight from China
Nobody's gonna change that. They'd have to rewrite the app to be sure there are no hidden leeches and they'll and use some technobabble to placate the politicians instead.
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@Bulb said in In other news today...:
use some technobabble to placate the politicians instead.
I feel a business opportunity here.
"We're harnessing the power of open-source to train a next-generation artificial intelligence which creates a paradigm shift in automated code validation, guaranteeing our customers a source code that is free of foreign interference, safer, and works for a more inclusive and diverse future."
(no, it won't work, but you said "technobabble" and "politicians", so who cares?)
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@DogsB As long as MS managed to get Oracle to pay more...
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
My money is on an applet resurrection.
Wow, that’s a lot of money to tank a shitty app. Surely, just banning it (for no real reason) would be much cheaper, but I guess the Chinese wouldn’t have that.
I mean, did Oracle ever buy anything they didn’t immediately fuck up and throw away?
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
@anonymous234 said in In other news today...:
If you count millions of cringy videos of people dancing as a "social network"
I keep reading that as Macarena. Seems appropriate.
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@HardwareGeek At $40 billion this seems to be the second biggest tech acquisition of all time.
...and that's the headline they come up with? "Creating World’s Premier Computing Company for the Age of AI"? Makes them look like they bought some weird machine learning startup. Why not go with "we'll control all processors in phones AND desktop computers in 20 years, bitch"?
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
@DogsB said in In other news today...:
My money is on an applet resurrection.
Wow, that’s a lot of money to tank a shitty app. Surely, just banning it (for no real reason) would be much cheaper, but I guess the Chinese wouldn’t have that.
I mean, did Oracle ever buy anything they didn’t immediately fuck up and throw away?TimesTen, I guess?
I mean they may have fucked it up but they still seen to have it around?
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@anonymous234 said in In other news today...:
@DogsB I find it hard to imagine a worse company to own a major social network* than Oracle. Oracle makes expensive enterprise products for big faceless corporations. They don't interact with the public. The closest they have to a product for "end users" is Java, which they bought and immediately mishandled so badly that everyone else had to start actively telling users not to install it.
*If you count millions of cringy videos of people dancing as a "social network"
Oracle are phrasing it as being the "technology partner" which suggests they might not be responsible for the whole thing.
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@coderpatsy said in In other news today...:
If the evidence, indicating the presence of the molecule phosphine, is indeed associated with life
Well, that's the million-dollar if, isn't it?
Ranjan along with Paul Rimmer of Cambridge University then modeled how phosphine produced through these mechanisms could accumulate in the Venusian clouds. In every scenario they considered, the phosphine produced would only amount to a tiny fraction of what the new observations suggest is present on Venus’ clouds.
“We really went through all possible pathways that could produce phosphine on a rocky planet,” Petkowski says. “If this is not life, then our understanding of rocky planets is severely lacking.”
Considering how much we still don't understand about our own rocky planet, that lack would not be surprising.
“Now, astronomers will think of all the ways to justify phosphine without life, and I welcome that. Please do, because we are at the end of our possibilities to show abiotic processes that can make phosphine.”
At least they are open to the possibility their findings may be refuted, contrasted with that article that was posted in the last day or two (I don't remember what topic it was in; in the Garage, maybe? Edit: Found it; it has its own dedicated thread, and it's not even in the Garage.) about the multitude of social science papers that have almost no hope of being reproducible, but nobody cares.
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@topspin
So it's a win-win?
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@Dragoon said in In other news today...:
The interesting part, to me, is that this would seem to be an argument in favour of the "layered" convection model of the mantle. While the "whole" model is the widely accepted one (see e.g. Wikipedia), things like this, that point at separated systems, would argue for a more "layered" one. But of course diamonds just show the Carbon cycle, not the actual convection cells, and there are many other things to consider. Still, an interesting bit of complexity.
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@anonymous234 said in In other news today...:
Why not go with "we'll control all processors in phones AND desktop computers in 20 years, bitch"?
It's not exactly control. More “we'll get a slice of money from every computing device in the whole world!” Trying to exert control will just ruin the value in the IP.
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
@anonymous234 said in In other news today...:
Why not go with "we'll control all processors in phones AND desktop computers in 20 years, bitch"?
It's not exactly control. More “we'll get a slice of money from every computing device in the whole world!” Trying to exert control will just ruin the value in the IP.
"From every device, yeah? Be a shame if your other products' licensing costs went through the roof, to compensate for your... lack of commitment, now wouldn't it?"
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
Oracle boots out Microsoft and wins bid for TikTok, reports say
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@dcon said in In other news today...:
Compton
Ah, that explains it. Among the worst hell-holes of American inner cities.
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From last week:
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
That story understates the situation. Based on other sources, they were each shot 4 or 5 times. After the attack, she helped her partner out of the patrol car and to a location with some cover before providing first aid.
Doing that in her state is amazing.
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@Dragoon Canada, meet Spain and Germany. And sit down. They've got something to tell you and it's going to make you sad. (Also pay no attention to France who has a "one weird trick"; EU courts have already said no.)
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
Her courage under fire, steady head, and swift action ensured that both herself (a 31 yr old mother of 6 yr old son) and her partner (a 24 yr old single man) -- each recent recruits -- survived the attack and, after life saving surgery, will return home to their families.
Two "recent recruits" as a patrol in a clearly hostile area?
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Wooo... ok, 3090 can already go eff itself. I don't even want to know.
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@Applied-Mediocrity Does it come with an integrated rice cooker?
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@acrow It does not indicate it was a particularly hostile area, so I'd assume it was just the downtown-in-California-normal hostile and the attack was rather random. Of course it would still make more sense to pair new recruits with someone experienced.
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@dkf The surface isn't even treated with a non-stick!
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The colors have already been discussed in WTF Bites, but here's the rest of their product announcement:
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
Her courage under fire, steady head, and swift action ensured that both herself (a 31 yr old mother of 6 yr old son) and her partner (a 24 yr old single man) -- each recent recruits -- survived the attack and, after life saving surgery, will return home to their families.
Two "recent recruits" as a patrol in a clearly hostile area?
I'd heard that they'd each been on the force for about 14 months. Also it's not usually that hostile.
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The changes include:
- Project storage is limited to 10 active and editable documents
- Exports are now limited to a small number of file types. Thankfully this still includes STL files but alas, DXF, DWG, PDF exports are all gone
- Perhaps most importantly to the makerverse, STEP, SAT, and IGES file types can no longer be exported, the most common files for those who want to edit a design using different software.
- 2D drawings can now only be single sheet, and can only be printed or plotted
- Rendering can now only be done locally, so leveraging cloud-based rendering is no longer possible
- CAM support has been drastically cut back: no more multi-axis milling, probing, automatic tool changes, or rapid feeds, but support for 2, 2.5, and 3 axis remains
- All support for simulation, generative design, and custom extensions has been removed
Most of these changes go into effect October 1, with the exception of the limit on active project files which goes into effect in January of 2021. We’d say that users of Fusion 360’s free personal use license would best be advised to export everything they might ever think they need design files for immediately — if you discover you need to export them in the future you’ll need one of the other licenses to do so.
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Mostly funny because you hear the instructors shout 'Van België' (lit. from Belgium).
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
- We’d say that users of Fusion 360’s free personal use license would best be advised to
fork over wads of cash for a better license.
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@dcon said in In other news today...:
@acrow said in In other news today...:
- We’d say that users of Fusion 360’s free personal use license would best be advised to
regularly fork over wads of cash for a better license.
FTFY, because it's a subscription model.
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@JBert said in In other news today...:
@dcon said in In other news today...:
@acrow said in In other news today...:
- We’d say that users of Fusion 360’s free personal use license would best be advised to
regularly fork over wads of cash for a better license.
FTFY, because it's a subscription model
An artist I follow recently had their PC die. Earlier this week they ranted that their old buy-once-use-forever photoshop license could not be activated anymore.
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@TwelveBaud said in In other news today...:
@remi, @Steve_The_Cynic, I'm sorry, but your government says you can't post here anymore. Every post needs a signed paper contract with Inedo.
Thanks to someone who should remain unnamed ( ) I stumbled on this old article and searched a bit what happened since.
A short flashback: in 2018, Twitter was sued by a consumers' association and part of their ToS was ruled unlawful, in particular the part where you grant them a perpetual license to do as they wish with your stuff, which is contrary to French IP law.
At the time, I first said that it probably didn't matter as much as the articles about it made it sound () but also that it could probably be fixed by a small tweak in Twitter ToS (basically add a couple of clauses clarifying what for the license is).
So, what do you think happened? If you've said "nothing", congratulations!
I just checked the current ToS and the ones that were explicitly struck out by the tribunal 2 years ago, and they are exactly identical (at least for that part).
Which means that clause is probably exactly as illegal as it was the first time round. But does it matter one way or another? If you've said "no", congratulations again!
AFAICT, the ruling means that this clause is void. But as I alluded to in my initial reaction, the tribunal spent a long time (probably because Twitter lawyers insisted on it!) explaining that this clause is not a "core part" of the ToS and therefore can be voided without affecting the rest of the contract. So Twitter ToS just stay with those void clauses (i.e. as if they weren't there). I imagine that, not having an explicit clause granting them exploitation rights on your content (since that clause is void!), you could possibly sue them for exploiting it without your consent but if the consumers' association who started the whole thing didn't do it, there must be some legal reason why it doesn't work (maybe you'd have to prove that Twitter did use one specific piece of your content in a way that's not what you could "reasonably" expect, and good luck with that...).
Tl;dr: a big fat nothingburger.
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@remi lots of TOSs, employment contracts, rental agreements, etc have unenforceable clauses in them. They're there to scare the common folk who don't know that a court had already said that they can't be enforced.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in In other news today...:
@remi lots of TOSs, employment contracts, rental agreements, etc have unenforceable clauses in them. They're there to scare the common folk who don't know that a court had already said that they can't be enforced.
That in itself should be punishable, at least for corporations large enough to have an army of lawyers to know better, or in this case proven knowledge that the clauses are illegal.
What's to stop them from putting in all kinds of unenforceable garbage in the hopes someone actually hands over their first-born? Oh right, they already do.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
That in itself should be punishable
That's a slippery slope. You start with "no unenforceable legal clauses" soon it's "EULAs have to be actually explained to the user in simple terms", and before you know it, people can start directly knowing what's illegal and what's not without having to spend thousands of dollars in lawyer consultation fees.
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@topspin I agree that it's scummy if done intentionally.
But then you have the fact that (in the US at least) the enforceability varies by jurisdiction (not even state, but sometimes locality) and most of the forms (employment and rental at least) are stock forms drawn up nationwide rather than customized per individual. Heck, I'd be willing to bet that most landlords don't know what's really enforceable in their jurisdiction. And some of the contracts pre-date those decisions.
One employment example is non-competes--they're not enforceable in California...kind of. Except sometimes they are. It's an awful mess.
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@boomzilla I know a lot of (alleged) humans with inconsistent brains.
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
People are that desperate to be confined in small enclosed space with no ability to step outside?