The Linux Foundation has released episode 4 of its A World Without Linux video series.
Called “Avatar Reimagined”, this latest video sees characters Sam and Annie going to the pictures (as we used to call them when I was a lad. Ed.) to watch a film with really bad special effects to make the point that the effects in many blockbuster movies are made on Linux supercomputers.
The Linux Foundation commissioned six episodes for the series, leaving one left before the final episode featuring Mr Linux Kernel himself, Linus Torvalds.
Linux distribution bug reports are not a place one expects to find stuff to make one smile: they’re normally places where the faults and failings of software are described in normally boring detail.
14.04, locked screen to go to lunch, upon return from lunch cat was sitting on keyboard, login screen was frozen & unresponsive.
To replicate: In unity hit ctrl-alt-l, place keyboard on chair. Sit on keyboard.
Resolution: Switched to virtual terminal, restarted lightdm, lost all open windows in X session.
What should have happened: lightdm not becoming unresponsive.
Ubuntu fans are now trying to reproduce this bug, including some who want to try and reproduce it with other pets, as per the latest comment on the bug report page reproduced below.
will it also work with a small dog, please some one with a small size dogs test it!
LightDM is the display manager running in Ubuntu. According to the Ubuntu Wiki, it starts the X servers, user sessions and greeter (login screen).
What’s a tahr? Wikipedia informs us that tahrs form a family of three species of large Asian ungulates related to the wild goat. The three species are the Himalayan tahr, Nilgiri tahr and Arabian tahr.
Finally, there are millions of pictures of cats and kittens all over the internet. Indeed, there’s even a Firefox add-on called Kitten Block that steps in whenever the user who has it installed attempts to access the right-wing Daily Mail and Daily Express websites. However, there are far fewer pictures of tahrs. Let’s remedy that with a fine picture of a male Himalayan tahr courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Hardly a day goes by when the hacks at the Bristol Post exhibit the poor quality of written English so prevalent in the media nowadays; and today is no exception.
Writing about a closure of the A4174 Avon Ring Road and clearly out of his usual field of politics, reporter Ian Onions drops a real clanger which would doubtless have been picked up if the paper still employed proper, old-fashioned, omniscient sub-editors.
Having a shelf life – that’s another first for a bridge!
Shelf life is the length of time that a commodity may be stored without becoming unfit for use, consumption, or sale. In other words, it might refer to whether a commodity should no longer be on a pantry shelf (unfit for use), or just no longer on a supermarket shelf (unfit for sale, but not yet unfit for use). It applies to cosmetics, foods, medical devices, explosives, beverages, pharmaceutical drugs, chemicals, and many other perishable items. In some regions, an advisory best before, mandatory use by, or freshness date is required on packaged perishable foods.
No sign of a bridge in that list of products, unless it’s covered by “perishable items“. 🙂
The term for which Mr Onions was grasping was clearly “service life“, whose definition is once again supplied succinctly by Wikipedia.
A product’s service life is its expected lifetime, or the acceptable period of use in service. It is the time that any manufactured item can be expected to be ‘serviceable’ or supported by its manufacturer.
However, since the reports headline tried to create uncertainty about the length of any road, I reckon the Post’s objective was more concerned with whipping up emotions amongst its predominantly car-obsessed readership than with accuracy in use of the written word.
If one only read the Bristol Post, there’d be no way that residents in the wider city would have any inkling that three polluting standby electricity generating stations were currently awaiting planning permission in the European Capital of Greenwash.
Fortunately, this dreadful development has been picked up by Bristol 24/7: and here’s the unsurprising bit; they are all in the more deprived parts of the city.
It is believed these power plants will form part of the Short Term Operating Reserve (Stor) network of reserve power banks which provide additional generating capacity to feed into the National Grid at peak times.
Firstly, a planning application (ref. 15/02310/F) has been submitted on behalf of Plutus Energy for a 48 unit diesel generating plant and 2 diesel storage tanks with a capacity of 22,000 litres for 6 Feeder Road, Bristol and Avonbank, Feeder Road, Bristol, (both in the deprived Lawrence Hill ward. Ed.) close to St Philips Marsh School.
Forty-eight diesel generators will doubtless chuck out a fair old quantity of particulates, which is a component of air pollution implicated in human cancer,heart and lung damage, and mental functioning.
The applicants have not conducted an environmental impact assessment for the site since its small size (0.5 ha) is below the threshold for such a requirement. Nevertheless, local ward councillors believe such an assessment should be carried out due to the size and impact of the proposed development.
In addition, some skulduggery is evident in the noise impact assessment that has been carried out. Edward Road was chosen for the noise impact, significantly further away from the site than St Philips Marsh School. Again, local councillors think this study should be reviewed and amended to include the impact on the school and the nearby Severn Vineyard Church.
A diesel generating plant somewhere in Africa
Despite the fact that inner city Bristol already has dreadful air quality, this is not the only dirty diesel generating plant planned for the city.
An application (ref. 15/04297/F) for another such facility has been submitted for Romney Avenue in Lockleaze, another of the city’s not so prosperous areas. Once again the applicants are Plutus Energy, who want to put 32 generators on this site close to a major housing estate and obviously care very little indeed for Bristol’s air quality.
Finally, yet another application (ref. 15/04420/F) has been filed by UK Power Reserve for 10 diesel or gas generators for in in New Gatton Road in St Werburgh’s, with ten 12-metre high exhaust flues.
Below is a short video on the St Werburgh’s scheme made by local residents.
It’s quite scandalous that UK Power Reserve and Plutus Energy are even considering putting polluting power stations in or next to residential areas. On account of the need for extra domestic heating and lighting, these back-up power stations are most likely to be used on cold, foggy winter days when something called a temperature inversion occurs; this causes cold air to sink, trapping the warm air in a bubble enveloping the city, thus enabling urban pollution to build up to dangerous levels, perfect for increasing the incidence of respiratory ailments. The fact that both companies have cut corners in the form of environmental and noise impact assessments shouldn’t be forgotten.
These dangerous unwelcome schemes should be thrown out by councillors.
Finally, a language note. Over in the United States of America, this dumping of dirty, polluting and generally unwelcome facilities on poor, deprived communities has a name – environmental racism. In Wikipedia, environmental racism is defined as follows:
Environmental racism is placement of low-income or minority communities in proximity of environmentally hazardous or degraded environments, such as toxic waste, pollution and urban decay.
Although you may not realise it, Linux is the world’s largest collaborative project in the history of computing. It runs most of the world’s technology infrastructure and is supported by more developers and companies than any other operating system. In addition, it’s ubiquitous; it can be found in your phone, car and office. Besides that, it also powers the internet, the cloud, stock exchanges, supercomputers, embedded devices and more.
The latest episode of the series tries to show us how hard it is to have social connections is a universe without Linux.
In the last year of so, the prominence of the courts interpreting contract fiasco has diminished, even though the actual problem itself has never gone away.
For instance, Wednesday’s Ilford Recorder reports that a new court date has had to be set for a man charged in connection with a stabbing in Ilford “because there were no interpreters available to translate for the defendant”.
Marcel Criahan, of Hickling Road, Ilford, appeared at Snaresbrook Crown Court via a video link yesterday after being arrested on 17th October in connection with an incident in which police found 49 year-old Florin Onea with a stab wound. After Onea died last Monday, police launched a murder investigation.
34-year-old Criahan was charged with GBH with intent on 18th October and appeared at Barkingside Magistrates Court the following day.
Today’s Guardian reports that organisers of the “Feira do grelo” food festival in As Pontes in Galicia were shocked when their event celebrating the culinary delights of turnips tops, a traditional staple turned out to be celebrating a rude part of the female anatomy.
To quote The Guardian’s piece:
But for the past few months, the small town was marketing a very different kind of festival after it used Google Translate to put the Galician word grelo into Castilian Spanish, ending up with it inviting people to take part in a “clitoris festival”.
And quoting yet again:
It meant the town’s “Feria [sic] do grelo” or rapini festival – held every February with tastings and awards for the best grelos – became “Feria clítoris” in Spanish.
Clitoris? Yes, according to Google Translate!Furthermore, The Independent adds that the error was not discovered until Castilian-speaking rapini fans visited the site to read about the upcoming festival and found themselves reading about a local clitoris festival instead of the benefits of the local vegetable.
The humorous consequences were fully reported in The Local.
The Castilian Spanish version of the town council’s website’s content about the festival included such howlers as “The clitoris is one of the typical products of Galician cuisine,” and “Since 1981, the festival has made the clitoris one of the star products of the local gastronomy.”
The reason for this embarrassing howler is that Google Translate mistakes the Galician grelo for the Portuguese word grelo – which is both the word for the vegetable as well archaic slang for clitoris.
“It’s a very serious error on the part of Google and we are thinking about making an official complaint for Google to properly recognise the Galician language so this kind of thing doesn’t happen again,” said town hall spokeswoman Montserrat Garcia.
Along with Spanish, Galician is an official language in Spain’s north-western region of Galicia, where over 2.4 million people speak the regional tongue.
Wikipedia informs us that the Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) is found in the northern Atlantic Ocean and in rivers that flow into the north Atlantic.
The salmon’s journey through life from fresh to salt water and back to fresh is not just an aquatic journey, but a terminological one too, as shall be shown.
The salmon spend their early life in fresh water, when the immature salmon are known firstly as alevin, then as fry and finally as parr, this final stage being when the juvenile salmon prepare to migrate to salt water.
When the parr develop into smolt, they begin their trip to the ocean; this occurs mainly between March and June. The length of time that young salmon take before journeying from sweet to salt water can vary between one year and eight years.
Once large enough, Atlantic salmon change into the grilse phase, when they become ready to breed and return to the same freshwater tributary from which they departed as smolts. It is believed that the salmon’s navigation for this journey involves a combination of magnetoception and the fish’s sense of smell as it nears its destination.
This return from salt to fresh water occurs from September to November, the time of the salmon run. After spawning most Atlantic salmon die and the salmon life cycle starts over again.
Many obstacles – some natural, some artificial – face salmon as they migrate upstream to their spawning grounds. One of these is formed by Shrewsbury Weir on the River Severn, the UK’s longest river.
This year jettybox.com was on hand to record the salmon run over the weir; and do so in slow motion, which adds a poignant beauty to this annual spectacle.
According to the Mail, FIFA are investigating claims that a junior member of staff was told to falsify official records of FIFA’s meetings of its Executive Committee (ExCo) between 2001 and 2010.
Former FIFA employee Scott Burnett first worked as a translator and then as an assistant to FIFA Secretary General Jerome Valcke, who like Blatter, is currently suspended.
Mr Burnett dropped his bombshell via 3 tweets, as follows.
I did not share this information before because I was concerned about the repercussions and I did not know who to trust within FIFA circles.
We linguists – irrespective of whether we work as translators or interpreters or both – deal regularly with privileged and confidential information. This is why I rarely discuss the content of my work in public. As such, I have great sympathy for Mr Burnett since being told to falsify records must clearly have conflicted with that inbuilt sense of integrity which all linguists need to do their jobs.
Mr Burnett is no longer employed by FIFA and currently volunteers to support grassroots football.
Linux distribution bug reports are not a place one expects to find stuff to make one smile: they’re normally places where the faults and failings of software are described in normally boring detail.
Hardly a day goes by when the hacks at the Bristol Post exhibit the poor quality of written English so prevalent in the media nowadays; and today is no exception.
It’s been an open secret for many years that FIFA – the international governing body for football – has been as reliable as a nine pound note.