mjw1007

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by mjw1007 6y ago
Right. Though I think a certain amount of the current anger is coming from the fact that their expeditions into side areas have been the opposite of lucrative in practice. To the extent that the board's suggestion that adopting the EGM
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by mjw1007 6y ago
I think there's some truth in that, but I think the bigger problem is that the people running it genuinely don't understand that Nominet's purpose is to do the best job it can of being the UK's NIC. Instead they believe
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by mjw1007 6y ago
Is it clear that the remaining directors (the elected ones) are reliable individuals? The letter from the board says "the Board is unanimous in its view that Simon’s proposed resolution should be rejected", so it seems possible to
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by mjw1007 6y ago
Nominet are currently saying the second resolution (to appoint new directors) is invalid. More background from Kieren McCarthy: First: https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/31/nominet_board_vote/ Most rece
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by mjw1007 6y ago
I was worried about that example, but the problem doesn't seem to be too bad, because the spec says: « A match statement may have at most one irrefutable case block, and it must be last. » So if I understand correctly the following wil
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by mjw1007 6y ago
I found parts of that announcement very difficult to follow. Can anyone tell me what the following means? « For too long, open source as both an industry and a community has done a poor audit of its expenses. Notably, ignoring the price of
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by mjw1007 6y ago
I think Wayland has come too close to the following pattern, which I've seen in other cases of free software which have become controversial: - decide it's time to make a New Thing which will supersede the Old Thing rather than li
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by mjw1007 6y ago
Summary: if you have an index on a column which is mostly NULL, consider using a partial index covering only the records where it's non-NULL.
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by mjw1007 6y ago
Background at https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/31/nominet_board_vote/
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Restoring Nominet’s Purpose(publicbenefit.uk)
1 points by mjw1007 6y ago|1 comments
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by mjw1007 6y ago
So, according to this article the Red Hat "liaison with the CentOS project" said: « we went to the CentOS project and said, here is a thing Red Hat is going to do. We believe there are consequences of this action... the end result
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by mjw1007 6y ago
The parallel to requiring naturally bearded people to shave their facial hair off is very close. Both are potentially mildly damaging, and they take roughly similar amounts of time to reverse.
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by mjw1007 6y ago
No, the universities don't see these companies simply as financing vehicles. They're genuinely set up as largely independent entities, with the researchers supposed to be making commercial decisions.
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by mjw1007 6y ago
Reading the WSJ article, it's not at all clear what the benefit (to anyone) is of the university spinning out a small for-profit company like Vaccitech. As I understand it, the theory is that such a company will be able to commercially
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by mjw1007 6y ago
And in hindsight it doesn't seem a terribly good example. Gecko was a technical success. On the non-technical side, it isn't at all clear that Netscape-the-company came out worse than it would have done if it had tried to stick wi
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by mjw1007 6y ago
As far as technology goes, I think what we describe as "fashion" is often mostly caused by a desire for safety in numbers, and to a large extent that's rational. If I pick the same language or framework or whatever as everyon
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by mjw1007 6y ago
Maybe as a response to Apple beginning to support iOS apps on Macs?
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by mjw1007 6y ago
Nowadays an approach that I find often worth trying is: - download a project in a suitable language that claims to do what you need - read its list of direct dependencies - implement your own thing using those same libraries - write your ow
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by mjw1007 6y ago
Why do you think the term "royalty" isn't applicable to a sales-based bonus when the copyright has transferred? I've processed many contracts which use the term in exactly that sense, and evidently SFWA use it that way t
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by mjw1007 6y ago
One of the books on the list is /Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry/, which is very much not a book written from a white perspective, and as far as I remember is lacking white saviours.
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by mjw1007 6y ago
From the post: « User: I just want to tell you that your app is broken, so you can fix it. Me: Yes, that's a support request, please open a ticket. » This is painful. Maybe the user is being reasonable, maybe they're not. Can&#x
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by mjw1007 6y ago
More recently than Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt ran for a third term, as a third-party candidate, four years after leaving office. He came second.
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by mjw1007 6y ago
According to the article, the cat wasn't made by the Nazca who made the famous lines, but an earlier culture a few hundred years previously.
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by mjw1007 6y ago
I observe the 1978 report that recommended that computer programs should be subject to copyright included the following recommendation in its conclusion: « Any legislation dealing with either computer or photocopying issues enacted and base
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by mjw1007 6y ago
« For decades prior to Oracle's lawsuit, most people in the software industry assumed that APIs couldn't be copyrighted. » Well, what were they supposed to assume? It's shameful that it's been 40 years since computer pro
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by mjw1007 6y ago
So, what we know is: « PHE had set up an automatic process to pull this data together into Excel templates [...] When [the row limit] was reached, further cases were simply left off. » The terrible thing here is dropping data rather than re
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by mjw1007 6y ago
I wouldn't blame Excel for having a row limit that's too low for this sort of data. But if, as the article suggests, loading a CSV file with too many into Excel leads to it silently dropping data , I absolutely would blame it.
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by mjw1007 6y ago
In addition to the issues other people have mentioned, Python benefits from a large standard library in a way that Rust doesn't, because Python scripts don't require a build step. So it's easier to use Python than Rust for a
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by mjw1007 6y ago
Right, always answer the question, even if you don't think the answer will be helpful: you might be wrong, and if you're not then providing the answer is likely to be the quickest way for the asker to find out that they didn'
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by mjw1007 6y ago
The goal of filing a bug is to help the project. I've had cases where I've filed a report saying something like "if I enable both A and B, the log messages disappear", and the maintainer has responded with "Why do y

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