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Open Source

Eric S. Raymond Calls SaaS 'Dangerous', 'Worse Than Proprietary Software' (ibiblio.org) 341

After Salesforce warned it retailers to stop selling military-style rifles, a larger issue was identified by Eric S. Raymond: software as a service. If the provider decides it doesn't want your business, you probably have no real recourse. OK, you could sue for tortious interference in business relationships, but that's chancy and anyway you didn't want to be in a lawsuit, you wanted to conduct your business. This is why "software as a service" is dangerous folly, even worse than old-fashioned proprietary software at saddling you with a strategic business risk. You don't own the software, the software owns you.

It's 2019 and I feel like I shouldn't have to restate the obvious, but if you want to keep control of your business the software you rely on needs to be open-source. All of it. All of it. And you can't afford it to be tethered to a service provider even if the software itself is nominally open source. Otherwise, how do you know some political fanatic isn't going to decide your product is unclean and chop you off at the knees?

Facebook

How Facebook Mis-Captioned the Launch of a NASA Supply Rocket (arstechnica.com) 37

An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica: An Antares rocket built by Northrop Grumman launched on Wednesday afternoon, boosting a Cygnus spacecraft with 3.4 tons of cargo toward the International Space Station. The launch from Wallops Island, Virginia, went flawlessly, and the spacecraft arrived at the station on Friday. However, when NASA's International Space Station program posted the launch video to its Facebook page on Thursday, there was a problem. Apparently the agency's caption service hadn't gotten to this video clip yet, so viewers with captions enabled were treated not just to the glory of a rocket launch, but the glory of Facebook's automatically generated crazywords...

Some of the captions are just hilariously bad. For example, when the announcer triumphantly declares, "And we have liftoff of the Antares NG-11 mission to the ISS," the automatically generated caption service helpfully says, "And we have liftoff of the guitarist G 11 mission to the ice sets."

There's more examples in the photos at the top of their article -- for example, a caption stating that the uncrewed launch "had a phenomenal displaced people at 60 seconds," and translating the phrase "TVC is nominal" to "phenomenal."

While the lift-off announcer does use what may be unfamiliar names for the rockets, along with other technical jargon, the article points out that YouTube's auto-captioning of the same launch "seemed to have no problem with those bits of space argot."

Comment Re:end the nonsense (Score 1) 322

Interesting. Here's what I don't hear anybody saying: Is the measles rate really very "high"? Certainly, it's higher than New York's last year, but how does it compare to Paris? London? I think it seems like NYC has less measles than London. And deaths? Sure, measles is really serious. But these days, is anybody actually dying from it? I kind of suspect this is just news theatre rather than a real (meaning interesting or significant) story. I have seen many a meme on reddit etc. calling people out for their weird beliefs about completely optional vaccinations like the flu and chicken pox.

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