Joe

Honestly, for human friendly queries, I would have taken a Splunk-query like approach, like KQL: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/kusto/query/?view=microsoft-fabric

It’s less likely to annoy an entire industry of SQL users, while appealing to those who use Splunk and similar tools for incident response and ad-hoc analytics.

Whether they really need their own DB for event data… perhaps… but these days you want to get this kind of data into your data lake sooner rather than later. Perhaps it can help with that.

No? It doesn’t seem to be a use case they target.

If you want to use git to store sensitive data, you should encrypt it before committing / pushing it.

I have a second SIM card for my phone number (for a tiny fee) … I need to direct where SMS go, but it rings on both.

You could probably also setup call forwarding from your work phone to your personal dumb phone - there will likely be an extra per-call cost.

And which cloud provider does your new book shop use? Muhahahahaha.

I voted for Kodos, btw.

This was similar to a trick that a few smaller (less serious) hobby-ISPs did back in the days of 14.4k/28.8k modems to take advantage of the “reasonably priced” business plans for ISDN. They’d register multiple businesses at a single address to qualify for the plans, then balance new egress connections across the pool using squid and other magic. Fun times…

How is it being enforced in Australia?

A webcam photo by the website or a specific third party service, ID verification through a “trusted third party” process, or a checkbox to confirm age?

How much information does the website get over and above “user is over 16 years old”, and how much does the government get, if any?

Explain your reasoning, please.

Within companies, I see it as a way to make complex things more accessible to those unfamiliar with them… with a huge risk of breaking the learning process, resulting in a lack of expertise down the road.

That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it were really capable of accuracy and improving itself, but right now it’s like we are driving increasingly fast toward a half-built bridge, hoping it will be built before we get there. I have my doubts.

For some things like first line support - there is huge potential, although it’s usually fucked up. First line support is a job where the brain turns off, scripts are followed, and there is little to no compassion with the customer/user, and language/accents are a significant challenge. Let’s replace first line support with a few good experienced support people who actively work to improve the system. Give them the tools to make 100x or 1000x the impact, with customer satisfaction as the goal.

I find it pretty useful to help get me over mental hurdle of starting something. So it’s faster than me procrastinating for another day. ;-)

https://archive.ph/2rFK4

Adblocker, engage!

Many governments get access to source code for critical systems as a condition for their use / part of contract negotiations. It’s also quite likely that Microsoft and all its services in China is operated as a Joint Venture.

China did have Red Flag Linux (with Government support) for a while, too.

I think you miss the point here, to be honest. Free as in freedom is typically considered more important than free as in gratis - at least in the open source / free software community.

Don’t get me wrong - I love that I don’t HAVE to pay for lots of quality software and tools, but the value is that it is developed openly and collaboratively, allowing me and others to adapt it to our own needs and optionally contribute back.

It’s often the software that would struggle to be successfully supported as an independent commercial product that ends up as open source. It’s natural for building block products like Operating System libraries and tools, UI toolkits, and other foundational technologies. It can also works for bigger or niche projects with enthusiastic developer communities, corporate sponsors, etc. Often companies sponsor existing useful OSS projects to maturity and beyond, as it suits their purposes.

Back to your question though: Who would decide whom receives funds on my hypothetical donation platform? Those who donate, as well as curated lists maintained by the platform and other users of the platform. eg. I choose to donate 50% to Project X, 40% to the “John’s Foundational GNU/Linux Libraries Collection”, and 10% to platform’s choice (which might be used to pay for the platform, then sponsor a competition, a project-of-the-week, etc)

Honestly, if people and companies could just pay $5-10/user/month to support their entire OSS ecosystem, many would. It’s far from that simple though. There is no central fund. If you are lucky, you have a favourite project or two with a registered charity in your jurisdiction, or a BuyMeACoffee, etc. That requires individuals to think and plan, and won’t have companies contributing in the same way.

Similar could be said for news - I’d happily pay $10/month for the news I read … but I am not going to sign up to 30 separate subscriptions just to read 1-2 articles per site each month. Microtransactions would be ideal for news, but the industry is obsessed with subscriber-lock-in. So instead I pay nothing, block ads, and use archive.ph and similar.

I could imagine central donation platforms, which OSS projects can sign up to, allowing individuals to influence where their contributions go. It would be a nightmare to administer globally - so it might have to be regional / jurisdictional initiatives. Allow companies to contribute more and choose centrally, or purchase subscriptions for employees and let them choose. Projects could set goals and redistribute donations over that amount. This could be a good EU funded project, actually.

One of the biggest benefits that I see these days comes from the use of workflow-as-code systems like Temporal or Restate. They make it super easy to add reliability and observability to normal procedural functions - no custom databases, state machine logic, message queues, etc.

I can write straight-forward code like I used to, and if something breaks, I can usually fix it on the go.

https://archive.ph/JkMcR

Boomerang-Fu ?

Hmm. You are right, but they might not need it for every region. Steam is probably big enough that existing regional companies would come to it and be eager to form partnerships. They could become more of a payment processor aggregator, focused on a low risk market segment. And of course they can do CCs directly too - that’s the easy part.

The challenge will be to get consumers on board. I know that I groan every time I need to enter my CC details online these days.

They would face anti-competitive behaviour from Peepal though. So it’s a risk.

Internally, they are probably already working on ways to appropriately segment their catalog based on payment provider. “Sorry User, you cannot purchase title X using Paypal. We recommend $Competitor instead.”

It sounds like some payment processors are treating mastercard’s contractual requirements as a hard risk in this case - maybe it’s justified, maybe not. Try getting corporate lawyers to be risk averse in the finance world. Mastercard doesn’t seem to want to soften their wording but talks platitudes in public statements. Shrug.

They could do it with significantly fewer people, for themselves and even for GOG, Itch and potentially others. Their use-case is digital payments for games, which is limited in scope and risk. PCI and compliance is a PITA, but manageable.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hacker

“The media’s definition of the real term malicious cracker. A hacker used to be a well respected individual who loved to tinker with gadgets.”, plus a few other definitions.