Posts by Bebu

Cancer patient forced to make terrible decision after Qilin attack on London hospitals

I often wonder....

Why these fairly critical systems are connected to the great unwashed internet. Dedicated restricted and protected networks that only internetwork with other equally secure networks in a very controlled manner make a lot of sense. But I suppose using the commodity internet is a lot less expensive and seemingly more convenient but unfortunately for malefactors too.

The technology for very secure systems and networks has been available for quite some time - even 802.1x dates from the early noughties.

I would hope that the critical control systems of nuclear reactors aren't connected to the internet, but that might be forlorn.

Always seems cheap and nasty, quick and dirty or easy, wins every time hence the cowboys have the run of the range so it's no surprise the rustlers are able to succeed in their perfidy.

Devs claim Apple is banning VPNs in Russia 'more effectively' than Putin

Re: Doing Business

sooner Putin and his friends will be hung

I understand men are hanged while beasts and laundry are hung but here I believe you are correct.

Re: Doing Business

《I guess Apple could have code in iOS that allows them to remotely disable phones in any particular region, but I doubt it would go down well with the folk here, knowing they have that capability.》

Another direction could be in a future iOS update install a VPN client for every russian iphone. :)

A bit like running the bowler hatted interference at the end of the 1999 remake of Thomas Crown Affair (but I still prefer the '68 version. :)

Cloudflare debuts one-click nuke of web-scraping AI

Re: Cloudfart

《How do you lot come up with these clever, witty names for things? Cloudfart, like cloudflare, but with "fart" instead. Oh my aching sides.》

Take the 'C' out of it for greater effect. ;)

Copies

I can't really see how that, or other analysis, infringes copyright,

I basically agree with your argument.

It gets interesting when you consider a simple case where you have recorded every distinct word in a document and in what positions it occurs eg "intelligence" occurs on page 12, line 9, word 7; page 13,...

Obviously the original document can be reconstructed from that down to the physical layout. Using only word offsets still preserves the logical content. (Ignoring punctuation etc.)

More lossy representations blur this even more but I also wonder whether LLM might be heading towards a holographic representation of its training sets.

Once you merge word adjacency frequencies from a large number of documents faithful recovery of any particular document is nearly impossible. It can probably come close though as in many disciplines the self proclaimed experts spout exactly the same semiliterate nonsense.

I am always deeply suspicious of any attempt to broaden the scope of, protection for, and duration of, intellectual property (copyright, patents...) as it has never benefited those that the proposed measures purport to protect. If copyright were inalienable and only non-exclusive licencing permitted most of that nonsense evaporate. eg A.A.Milne could only have licensed Pooh to Disney (and concurrently to anyone else if he chose to.)

Db2 is a story worth telling, even if IBM won't

Chris J Date's books on Rdbms...

I think had (indirect?) references to features in or planned for DB2.

Apparently he worked for IBM until '83.

I had probably half a dozen of his texts which were extremely lucid compared to some of codswallop writen by other contemporary authors. I was never really a DBA or developer but was interested in this area and knowledge representation in general. Sill have my copy of Sowa ;)

At one point I was wondering about placing Prolog in front of a rdbms but as I only had Turbo Prolog on MSDOS 3.x, I didn't get very far. ;( (Lots of ideas but very few resources.)

I vaguely recall reading about an implementation (planned?) of referential integrity* enforcement which Oracle (v5) didn't have. I would guess this was from DB2.

_{* as I recall that is requiring the existence of the primary key to which a foreign key refers. (no dangling pointers.:) Curiously the much lighterweight Unify 4.2 did support this to some extent.}

Japan's digital minister declares victory against floppy disks

Re: two-thirds of British children aged six to 18 didn't even know what a floppy disk is

The *real surprise* here is that one third did know what a floppy disk was.

I suspect fewer of this age group would recognise this item in AU as floppies were becoming uncommon in 2006 let alone in 2010 when the 18 year olds were 4 year old tots.

Show fifty year olds, and younger, a radio (thermionic) valve you would likely have 0% recognition. You will always find some daft audiophile with a vacuum tube amplifier saying "it's a dual pentode etc etc."

Re: The next....

the inks used for official documents were fading in a matter of decades or even years.

Oak gall inks would probably last a bit longer but you might have to use a goose quill as this ink apparently clogs fountain pens.

Goose quills can be still purchased on the internet (appears anglers also use the feathers to make flies) but you will likely also require a pen knife to sharpen your quill.

Vellum or generally parchment, goose quills and oak gore ink - the proper way to record matters of importance. :)

Not sure that this commons' official wasn't a few sheep short in the top paddock.

By the time the skin was to be made into vellum the animal definitely hadn't any further use for it. The skin's owner has long become veal or lamb chops before the vellum maker gets hold of it.

Make more sense for the MPs to refrain from consuming dairy producfs or lamb meats.

Re: The next....

Likewise, acording to Mary Beard, early Latin is practically impossible to understand to even the best Latin scholars.

I was thinking this was from a author of slightly erotic bodice rippers, but searching for Mary Beard I found that she is rather the full bottle on the Late Republic (when they were presumably still speaking early Latin.) I had unfortunately confused this eminent scholar with the late Barbara Cartland who presumably wasn't a great classicist but one never can tell as Dorothy Sayers was a very successful crime writer as well as a scholar.

Kernel tweaks improve Raspberry Pi performance, efficiency

NUMA improving performance on RPi5

Seems odd but it might make sense as I commented last week on the story run on Phoronix numa emulation yields significant performance uplift to raspberry pi 5 although I haven't looked at Linux kernel code since trying to get a non DEC adaptor in a DEC Alpha desktop to work under Redhat Linux 7.2 (*not* RHEL 7.2) so am definitely not the full bottle.* :(

_{* some might also say quid.}

VMware license changes mean bare metal can make a comeback through 'devirtualization', says Gartner

Network digital twins

The increasing complexity of networks means having an offline model will be useful to test changes.

No shit Sherlock? Who'd'a thunk it? /s

Having a model of your complex dynamic system that you might test various changes before pushing those changes out to the production system is a really clever idea. I wonder why no one had ever considered this before? /s

I wonder what Cisco's CML, GNS3 and EVE-NG do for a crust? /s

These chaps actually get paid in something other than monopoly money for stating the blindingly obvious?

Re: mmm

But some managers need a couple of consultants to tell them when to go toilet.

The brown stuff coming out the wrong end of the GI tract is a fairly reliable indication, I am led to believe, but most as manglement is generally afflicted with verbal dysentry the consultants are, as always, redundant.

BT bets big on AI with ServiceNow to cut legacy baggage

Boundless Joy...

If I were a BT customer I would, if at all possible, be taking my business elsewhere before this is fully deployed.

Otherwise I suspect trying afterwards like entering Dante's Hell you might have to lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.

Patterns darker than hell itself.

Oak Ridge boffins twist exotic metal into eco-friendly, solid-state cooler

Pumping heat.

Well if this is to be useful it actually needs to pump heat, not just absorb it and then almost immediately return it to wherever it came from.

....

So how is the transfer going to take place, and what will be the likely transfer efficiency?

I would guess that carefully tailored (narrow and intense?) magnetic fields which are repeatedly steered through such a material could move heat absorbed into the material from one side to the opposite side where it might be shed by conduction and convection. (A little like peristalsis.)

The image I have is a Carnot cycle with a mixture of phonons and magnons as the working fluid. :)

The hope, I suppose, is that this research will lead to new, cheaper materials that could make inexpensive, efficiently and reliable solid state refrigeration more widely available especially in regions where photovoltaic+battery are the only practical options.

The H₂-NH₃ absorption refrigeration cycle (eg Platen-Munters) run directly from solar heat or indirectly from solar electricity (PV) seemed at one time to be a viable alternative but apparently hasn't materialized.

Switzerland to end 2024 with an analog FM broadcast-killing bang

Re: Australia uses AM for emergency broadcasts

"...sitting in the corner, staring passively at in their hand. We are not sure about this behaviour, it might be something religious..."

Some years ago one evening, when I was walking past a backpackers hostel which had a large refectory table outside in the front courtyard, I spied over a dozen young people seated around the table all apparently deeply engrossed in prayer.

Then I noticed the telltale glow of a led display reflected in all their faces and I could not stop laughing, discretely moving quickly on my way.

Re: FM? Bah, humbug! DAB? bah, humbug²

I thought the BBC only kept Long Wave and The Archers going to fallstall a premature ejaculation by our Trident subs.

A beer for the idea that The Archers have been preventing WW3 all these years.

Omitting an early childhood in NZ, where, at that time the program was broadcast, I don't remember much other than nothing whatsoever seemed to happen and everyone talked like the residents of Invercargill (NZ.)

Not broadcast in AU I think but (chief) inspector Morse* religiously listened to the program (often the Sunday morning omnibus session) so I assume it must have had its merits apart from preventing (delaying?) nuclear conflict.

_{* who was also partial to an ale or three.}

Re: Funny in its ways.

According to the viamux.com site they are running a small scale DAB+ pilot in Dublin but the site might be pre the RTE DAB shutdown.

In AU we have DAB+ in the capitals and some larger regional centres and works quite nicely if you live in these. The receivers themselves normally also have FM which covers most of the rest of the population.

The national broadcasters (ABC, SBS) also broadcasts some of their radio stations ever digital tv channels which extends their coverage.

The DAB+ receivers were originally more expensive (> 4 times the price eg AUD120 v. AUD 20) of comparable AM/FM receivers which meant a slow uptake. Living in Sydney when the rollout started I managed to purchase a cheap (AUD100) Grundig receiver which is still going strong and was a decent FM radio for the decade I was in the countryside.

Unfortunately my not being blessed with golden ears, I cannot really detect the difference between identical FM and DAB+ broadcasts although the slight time delay between the two is a little eerie.

How tech went from free love to pay-per-day

Re: The gigantic statistical text-prediction models

current AI hype is little more than a clown show

Also known, and quite properly as a circus.

As has always been the case every circus eventually has to leave town to make way for a new set of clowns.

The crypto bozos were supplanted by the travesty of these large lipped morons peddling their artificial inanity with the deceit of intelligence.

I am sure when the next Ding-a-Ling circus troupe erects its big top, the vulturati will be thinking* "what fresh hell can this be?"

_{* possibly channelling Dorothy Parker}

Google Translate now fluent in 110 additional languages from Abkhaz to Zulu

Re: Bring back the babelfish

The fact the babelfish was aurally inserted was, at least in australasia at that time, a stroke of Adam's humourous genius.

The rhetorical question "what's that hanging out your ear" was clearly understood by the subject that the questioner was asserting it was the instrument that had recently fornicated with the subject's brain and was still evident.*

I think that, possibly too subtle, verbal abuse has now passed into oblivion.

_*FITH

I wanted to gitve it a go with afrikaans

Elon Musk is geen verlies vir Suid-Afrika nie.

But the only afrikaans I know is the little found in John Buchan's stories so I cannot say if the translation is valid although I am sure the sentiment is.

I have noticed the latin can be a bit peculiar.

Navaho isn't on the list so the US WW2 code talkers' exchanges are still safe from the chocolate factory's grasp.

MIT's bionic leg upgrade leaves amputees walking like the wind

Rather promising

Seems a lot more practical and vastly less invasive than Musk's Neuralink offering.

The linked article in J Nature Med.Today is rather technical. :)

For those who like me, after so many years, are a bit fuzzy about afferent and efferent they are here respectively: to the brain and from the brain (basically L. ad = to, ex = from (out of).)

From a quick read it seems the residual muscles on either side of joint have both sensors and stimulating electrodes surgically implanted.

These implanted sensors' output is ultimately fed into the system that controls the motion of the prosthesis.

The implanted electrodes stimulate the muscle with positional and velocity information, and other parameters ultimately derived from the prosthesis which the (neuroplastic) central nervous system will accept as feedback which will then modify the nerve pulses to the residual muscle thus closing feedback loop. (Extremely nonlinear I would imagine.)

I have used "sensor" and "electrode" but there could be strain gauges embedded into the muscle as well as miniaturized electromechanical devices to stretch the muscle fibres.

Given the growing number of amputees from recent conflicts as well as the steady flow from automoblie and other accidents this is surely welcome development.

Beijing says state owns China's rare earth metals

Australia is in this game too

Last month Federal treasurer orders Chinese-linked investors to offload shares in Australian rare earths mine

Reminded me a little of Dain Ironfoot's "wee proposition."

Brace for new complications in big tech takedowns after Supreme Court upended regulatory rules

Given some of the recent decisions of the SCOTUS...

I have to wonder whether some of the actors were misdirected on their way to their engagement with the D'Oyly Carte company.

China working on standard for brain-computer interfaces

You have to... because its a (ISO) standard!

I can imagine in the not too distant dystopian future the residents of the PRC will be required to interface to People's Patriotic Cybercontroller.*

Edging closer to John Lumic's Cybus Industries' (mandatory) upgrade.

Although I imagine a successful hack of the Cybercontroller would be " game over."

_{* I imagine the "right" material downloaded into their unpatriotic "lying flat" (tang ping) youngsters could reverse the PRC's collapsing birth rate. :)}

An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Let's start a fight with the Welders

Surprised no one just went full retard and pulled out the thermite. ;)

I would have thought in the original rather extraordinary case an ad hoc team would been formed which analysed and documented the problem, evaluated the possible solutions, also documented, and having selected presumably the least worst option, prepared a plan for the preparations, execution and clean up which would have been examine by all the parties involved and after feedback amended.

Once the operation was complete a debriefing session (or post-mortem) to record what did happen and unexpected problems that arose and their rectification.

All the documents catalogued and placed in long term records storage along with a mothballed wielder.

The ad hoc team then dispersed.

Such ad hoc teams should be formed under the auspices and direct report of a very senior executive (VP level) to prevent the usual duck shoving.

When years later when the same problem arose this documentation could have been perused by a similar team and the script including checklists followed (hopefully ensuring beforehand the latter day Andy was a competent wielder with an off-site practical test.)

Today's IBM having eradicated it's dinobaby infestation would have some fresh liberal arts graduate turn up to repair your mainframe while pulling out a thermal lance declaiming "this should fix that baby!" Doubtless.

Chinese space company accidentally launches rocket in test gone wrong

Re: That seems a bit close to an urban area

Surely with a country as large as China they have some space a good distance away from urban areas to do rocket tests!?

Or in a majority Uighur (or other "difficult" ethnicity) region.

I vaguely recall the PRC used to do (does?) its nuclear weapons testing in somewhere named Lol Nor which I should imagine is pretty remote and (now) unpopulated.

I can imagine someone in procurement got some high-tension steel bolts knocked up in the local smithy probably out some discarded horseshoes or cast iron fence railings and pocketed the difference.

Microsoft hits snooze again on security certificate renewal

How hard is it?

The same failing was a fairly common occurrence where I was employed. The various sites with which I had any association were hosted centrally as was the certificate management. In the end I wrote a short script that read a list of hosts (FQDN) and servername (SNI) and port from a file and invoked openssl to extract the site's certificate expiry date from the server.

The script ran every 24 hours and if the expiry was within two weeks it generated a warning for the particular site.

After a few days central IT would get a tap on the shoulder.

I actually checked the certificate's start date was also valid.

Staff attrition and turnover were the root causes of these problems (like letting their domains expire - twice) which I suspect is the same self inflicted wound that Microsoft and many (most?) enterprises are suffering.

A whiteboard or spreadsheet or registrary isn't much use if there isn't anyone left.

US lawmakers wave red flags over Chinese drone dominance

Re: Point of order

stars and bars picture etc here

Things this comment_retard_é learns here.

I suspect the vast majority of US citizens have not read their nation's constitution, of those that have, few understood what had read and I am not entirely convinced I could safely exempt the bench of the US S.C.

So writes a foreigner who as a bored undergraduate on a quiet night looking for reading material in his residential college's library settled on a volume of early cases in US constitutional law. Surprisingly interesting even for this decidedly non legal reader. I suspect it would be extremely inconvenient if the US S.C. were bound by (it's own) precedents.

NASA tests the ups and downs of air taxi comfort with VR

FSF?

I will never understand how anyone, ANYONE, thinks the average person is going to get a license to fly any kind of vehicle

I imagine fully self flying (FSF) is envisaged by the money.

More accurately For Sweet F§'s sake who thought a LLM that was trained with data that omitted the fact that a city's skyline does change over time, was a good idea?

Like having George of the Jungle as your pilot(driver)... worse in that a skyscraper is commonly larger than the average tree.

Mars is slam-dunked by hundreds of basketball-sized meteorites every year

Clarifying

I would insert The meteorite impacts cause high acoustic frequency marsquakes, distinct from other seismic events if acoustic is the word that correctly describes seismic vibrations. Otherwise the frequency of impacts is confusable with the frequency of the seismic waves produced.

The actual planetary year intended isn't specified in: Mars is hit by meteorites between 280 and 360 times a year.

If God is in his heaven...

What are the odds of him [Musk's] stepping out onto the surface and getting hit by a basketball sized meteorite? A dead cert I would hope.

Failing any such benevolent miracles the odds are pretty much in his favour.

With around 300 impacts per year [terrestrial or martian?] distributed over 1.44×10⁸ km² or imagining Musk occupying a square metre that's 1.44×10¹⁴ m² ie 144 trillion other places for a space rock not to fall on Space Karen (and more than three hundred other days when he's not in that location.)

what are the odds of him [Musk's] getting to Mars in the first place? Not high enough for my liking! We can but hope and keep quiet about his kidneys packing up, on the journey to Mars. I cannot imagine a more deserving recipient for peritoneal dialysis.

But the real answer is a few months after he faces off, in the ring, against Zuckerberg. Two additions to head a little list.

American interest in electric vehicles short circuits for first time in four years

Re: EVs are nothing more than debt and status symbol

One might christen a vehicle Fernando.

Why? It's something that's just to gets you from A to B and from B back to A. (ABBA :)

Seriously though taking a strictly utilitarian approach to transport viz that vehicles are purely abba devices rather than an expensive and by any financial criterion, an extremely foolish investment in something that is peddled mostly as a status enhancing accessory.

Living now in a large city with fairly decent and improving, public transport options, the practical justifications for purchasing an new or replacement vehicle, ICE or EV, are virtually nonexistent.

We still run (~8,000km/yr) a 20+ year old JP 2L/4 cyl. sedan that we acquired second hand, 14 years ago while we were living in a rural community.

If that vehicle had to be replaced I could not rationally justify the expenditure. Apart from the lack of utilitarian reasons, my spouse's eyesight now precludes her driving and glaucoma will likely prevent my driving in less than three years.

I suspect courage would fail me if I were vision impaired and faced with the prospect of being chauffeured in self driving vehicle.

Antitrust latest: Europe's Vestager warns Microsoft, OpenAI 'the story is not over'

"I'll get you next time, Gadget, next time!"

Presumably a reference to Dr Claw (M.A.D) the arch adversary of Inspector Gadget?

Insp. Gadget image

_{I hadn't realized the good inspector was originally voiced by Don Adams (aka Agent 86 :)}

Microsoft CEO of AI: Your online content is 'freeware' fodder for training models

So we need DCMA 2.0?

I would take a raincheck on that. DCMA 1.0 as for as I can see has only benefited large US corporations while making large inroads into the Public Domain, even challenging the validity of the concept itself.

I could see from a lot of ill considered and rash ideas from those affected (creators, copyright owners) being shanghaied by the "perpetrators" to produce a model where everything has a copyright (IP) owner or a deemed owner which effectively extinguishes the "Public Domain."

There is a fundamental conceptual problem here. If I were to consult the vast online open access resources available for programming or network technology, I would have internalized that (often copyrighted) content and I then might proceed to obtaining paid employment using that knowledge - this is considered fair dealing. [In my case the dead tree network was my source of this information but the principles are not too dissimilar.]

The conceptual problem I see is: how is my reading and internalizing a web page manifestly different from a LLM being trained with the same page? In neither case are the page's contents reproduced or stored the LLM or my brain (I don't have an eidetic memory.) To the extent that the source content could be reproduced from within an LLM I would guess would be no more than is permitted by the far dealing provisions of the Copyright Act.

When content is published the creator, owner and publisher can (or should be able to) jointly or severally specifiy permitted access and subsequent use of the published material. Any breach or dispute should have a simple, low cost process available to the parties to obtain timely remedy (with very limited recourse to judicial appeal procedures.)

Currently I don't think there are any real sanctions available to site owners whose site has been indexed by a web crawler that ignored their Robots.txt.

That would be a breach of a publisher's permitted access and permitted use (indexing.)

The content's licence normally specifies the owner and/or creator's restrictions and permissions.

A fairly simple example I would consider is where I train a LLM on the entire Public Domain corpus of The Gutenberg Project say from an offline resource (eg their 2010 DVD.)

From my reading of Gutenberg's T&C I think I would not be in conflict with any of those provisions.

Posing rhetorical questions I would ask what moral or ethical lines will I have crossed at that point? And when I provide free, open access to my trained LLM? Finally when I place a paywall in front of my LLM?

Finally how does one legislate ethics and morality? Extant attempts are without exception cures disastrously worse than the disease.

Personally I would prefer this whole Al circus would disappear up its own arse taking its entire troupe of AI snake oil peddling clowns with it.

CISA looked at C/C++ projects and found a lot of C/C++ code. Wanna redo any of it in Rust?

Choices

Memory safetly at least in preventing buffer overflows (range errors) and use after free would appear to reduce to the choices of automatic memory management (garbage collection) or the overt gymnastics of guaranteeing memory safety properties in Rust (and other languages?)

Automatic memory management in languages like Go, Java etc etc are fairly undemanding on the average code monkey but can have performance problems and greater resource requirements.

Rust requires a great deal more from the developer / software engineer of whom there really are very few sufficiently skilled individuals to fully leverage Rust's benefits which will always be a contraint.

[If they were really clever rather than than believing they were clever, they wouldn't be here. Archchancellor Ridcully? ;)]

The realpolitik is that critical systems (or those parts that are critical) will be (re)writen in Rust etc, with the less performance limited parts in Go etc and the rest with the usual suspects C/C++ etc etc

So I imagine there will be really expensive and proprietary systems and components used by military, goverment and financial institutions and the polloi will get the existing tat.

I cannot help thinking that the US DOD has already been down this road with ADA which was mandated for DOD projects but of course a case of "more observed in the breach." From memory ADA was a fairly memory safe language and the ADA based SPARK language provides a lot more than the safety guarantees of Rust but of course at a cost.

Of the Five Eyes I know AU spent a lot on formal verification of their then new diplomatic communications systems (1990s) so there is some form there. Doesn't mean much if some of those protected communications end up on a US army corporal's memory stick. :(

Programming has more cardinal sins than just those related to memory which are probably better addressed by languages like SPARK or possibly, for those with more than a five minute attention span, Eiffel.

ChatGPT wrongly insists Trump-Biden CNN debate had 1 to 2-minute delay

"Joe totally had editing help that night"

Bernie on the console?

Really are the Old Men at the Zoo.

Microsoft answered Congress' questions on security. Now the White House needs to act

A Bit of Doggerel

The security thespian sitting on his arse

all the day long shining his trousers.

His peering into his single pane of glass

never an inkling of his doom arouses.

Dismay when his fate comes to pass.

-- anon.

Possibly after Sing a Song of Sixpence.

'One Less Car' Uber bets a grand you'll ditch your wheels

Public Transport

The majority of the state capital cities in Australia have reasonable public transport options (at least for the less peripheral suburbs) when compared with many similar cities in North America, I understand.

Brisbane has a fairly extensive integrated bus network but one of the ongoing problems, certainly from the time of COVID if not before, is the chronic shortage of drivers. Many drivers are well into their late sixties or seventies, likely answering this vocation after retirement (now 67 years in AU.)

In order to encourage the population back to public transport from October the bus fares will be essentially gratis our equivalent of an Oyster Card will be debited AUD 0.50 (~GBP 0.26, 26p, [half crown 2/6d in the old money for the faredge "reformers"]), and that charge is only to track use etc.

There is currently a brawl between two levels of government on whether there are enough buses (and by implication sufficient drivers) to handle even a 10% uptick in patronage.

Concurrently before the courts a seventy year old bus driver is facing dangerous driving charges after everyone was upset with his accidentally but unfortunately fatally running down a teenager. Notwithstanding the merits of crown's case this isn't likely to recruit more (older) drivers.

FWIW: most of Über et al. drivers in BNE appear to have "day" jobs and their driving gig is as much to meet their (new) vehicle's finance repayments as much as anything else. Perhaps they should be driving buses.

I was always of the understanding that all Über vehicles were owned by the contracting drivers.

If they were overwhelmingly successful in their stated aims of this program they would have to invest in acquiring a fleet (with or without [FSD] the need to employ drivers) which would also mean a large amount of capital sunk in a rapidly depreciating asset just like any other transport enterprise that they have often depreciatingly referred to as "so last century."

Finance, delusion, deceit, skulduggery, bubbles and other shenanigans are perennial.

Personally from the outset having scented the definite aroma of the less than honest and exploitative, I would never go anywhere near Über et al. Traditional taxis with their faults have always been reliable for me. The opinions of the taxi driver are far more amusing, and frequently well to the right of sanity than those of his modern competitor and therefore far more interesting. YMMV.

Windows: Insecure by design

Re: how much punishment are you willing to take?

None at Redmond's hands. Nae king! Nae quin! Nae laird! Nae master! We willna' be fooled again!^☆

At home? Linux user for decades.

Not too unlikely as from 2000 is more than two decades.

I had Redhat 4.0 (1996) and 4.2 - the first from an APC magazine cover cdrom, the second purchased from a bookshop.

These aren't the earliest distros as I already had a cdrom with Slackware source code amongst Unix and X11 sources.

In 1996 I started managing (sysadmin etc etc) Unix boxen and had a single Linux PC with a multiport serial adaptor and a collection of v34b dialup modems so Linux was already being used in anger. ;)

My next Linux box was building a screening bridge* (ebtables+ipchains? or iptables?) to protect rather sensitive material running on... you guessed it: Windows boxes... but no prizes.

My good fortune was that I didn't do windows - I haven't a head for heights and am allergic to Windex.^® I even get vertigo from looking at a ladder or from seeing a squeegee.

_{☆ Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men 2003.}

_{* Sometimes you can't change the IP addresses or routes. The Linux distros of that era could be stripped to virtually nothing and the bridge didn't have an IP address just console access.}

Re: I hear you loud and clear

"That is why I have scheduled my Linux conversion to when I'll have the time to deal with it."

Unlike John Lumic's Cybus Industries' upgrade offering your Linux conversion will be an illuminating step on the road to Damascus. ;)

Having looked at application coding and systems programming under Windows at various times I don't envy you. Like most BOFHs the only practical use I have for windows is for the defenestrating of irritating items (people, printers.)

For the record: You just ordered me to cause a very expensive outage

Electrical Engineer?

Unless things are different in Blighty, I would have thought an electrical engineer (B.Eng. [EE]) would be extremely overqualified to be stripping out cabling - an incompetent irish builder (with or without garden gnome inserted), would be more than capable of performing this task and with greater certainly of the actual outcome.

Rather than stripping out great lengths of cable, I might cut one with a bit of slack to determine whether the sky did fall and in the event Chicken Little is vindicated the cut ends of the cable could be stripped and the doubtless myriad wires temporarily rejoined. With though fiber I guess you are f⊙'d.

A more imaginative Norman, at the first sight of his boss' bridling at his misgivings about the remaining cabling, might have offered said boss the "honour" of cutting those final cables and passed the tool the tool.

Re: Sometimes, when the stars & planets align just right ...

You can probably double your satisfaction as I can imagine his good lady has given him a good deal of grief over this since then.

If this arsehole learnt his lesson and subsequently modifying his attitude then everyone is a winner. As I entertain serious misgivings concerning the airworthyness of the S.domesticus I suspect he remained unreformed and probably sans wife.

Elon Musk to destroy the International Space Station – with NASA's approval, for a fee

Surprised...

The whole article managed to avoid any reference to "customary units" - pounds, feet, tons or miles. Left pondians with any interest in space tech are likely the more rational of their countrymen, I guess.

At 400,000kg I didn't realize this puppy weighs in at 400 tonnes (~70 elephants*) - that unexpectedly dropping in could really rain on your parade.

Based on previous examples I imagine SpaceX will attempt to drop it in the remote southern pacific/southern ocean as the southern hemisphere isn't considered to contain anything worth worrying about (by the nirthern hemisphere.) Perhaps a good time to visit Europe.

I don't know where Skylab was supposed to land but in the event a seriously large chunk ended up in Western Australia.

_{*African bush ekephant, adult male. Air speed? In this context terminal velocity. Or Rego units: 267 skateboarding rhinos. What species black, white, javan? Sex? Age? Abysmal. :)}

Re: It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission

[ Putin,Jinping,Kim Jung Un,Trump,Biden,Starmer,Sunak,Trudeau,Swinney,... ] :: [Musk] ?

I am reminded of "They never would be missed" G&S "I've got a little list*..." The Mikado°

I believe The Lord High Executioners list is modified in each production to relect the times.

° I linked the local product but the Jonathan Miller 1987 production with Eric Idle https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CWo_3CIcTBQ is brilliant.

_{* "Of society offenders / Who might well be underground^☆ / And never would be missed"}

_{☆ inhumed}

If you're using Polyfill.io code on your site – like 100,000+ are – remove it immediately

Obvious?

I would have thought where an entity was demonstrably engaged in illegitimate or unlawful activities such as this, the urgent forced surrender of the DNS domain would be entirely justified.

The idea of downloading any old excrement from arbitrary sites on the internet and shoveling it into your clients' browsers (or have their browsers do this at your site's behest) must rank with some of the world's worst ideas.

While clever and powerfuI I was never comfortable with anything like ECMA-Script messing with a browser's DOM.

Organized crime and domestic violence perps are big buyers of tracking devices

"to defame the victim in Court"

I don't think that is actually possible - perjury or contempt - yes.

AU is enduring a largely shallow, ultimately pointless debate over DV contaminated by undeclared and often irrelevant agenda.

Actually addressing the fundamental causes has been rigorously avoided (too hard, too expensive) and measures that try to minimise the harm that might have been avoided in the first place such as this and enhanced weapons controls unfortunately have dominated the discourse.

I am pretty sure trying to restrict criminals' access of GPS/BT tracking tech. is utterly futile and cynical political theatre.

I was wondering what the Wilkinson Sword reference was about - using my 4 blade razor I could threaten my victim with an extremely close shave (and shaving rash. ;)

But I suppose they still make cutlery and even ceremonial swords. I recently saw on sale in a craft shop the double edged razor blades that my father used in his "safety" razor (his father, a cutthroat.) Perversely the first thing that came to mind was a bar of yellow sunlight laundry soap.

Could immutability be a Leap too far for openSUSE users?

Puzzled?

non-immutable ≠ mutable?

Still a distro supported (security patches and major bug fixes) until 2037 is probably unique.

I would assume OpenSuSE Leap 15 won't be getting these "extended" support benefits at some point.

Running on new bare metal might be problematic in 2037 but by then all baremetal might have embedded hypervisors that can "virtualize away" any mismatches.

That is, if in 2037, we aren't all struggling to make fire with a bow drill. ;)

On-prem AI has arrived – the solution to cloudy problems no one really has

Re: HP + AI

《What a dreadful prospect. An image popped into my mind of a printer with Talky Toaster abilities... "Would you like me to print something? How about ink, shall I order more ink?"》

I imagine you might sell a lot of new (non HP, non Talkie ) printers.

Generative AI could probably have Talkie arguing the moral and ethical issues against my turfing it (and the defective piece of machinery it haunts) out the nearest window or failing an openable window, an extremely prejudicial introduction to a lead mallet

[Sometimes you just know what is right.]

The hatred of AI and AI machines probably needs a new word: misandroidism?

(I would avoid androidphobia as phobia now customarily conflates irrational fear, dislike and avoidance with outright hatred.)

Want to save the planet from AI? Chuck in an FPGA and ditch the matrix

Monogamy?

"In self attention, every element of a matrix interacts with every single other element," he said. "In our approach, one element only interacts with one other element."

The first ("self attention") by analogy is narcissistic promiscuity and the second ("interacts with one") monogamy. ;)

The former is both delusional and unhealthy continuing the analogy with hallucinatory AI.

At 3Wh per AI query (3 J per sec for 1 hour = 10800 J* or 10.8 kJ !) or a 3.0V chip drawing 60.0A for 1 minute. So we are cooking the planet in order to replace the human lack of intelligence with an artificial version of that same deficiency? ;)

_{* For unrecoverable faredge reformists and the recalcitrant left pondial: ~10.2 BTU, 7966 ft-lb(f), 2.58 kcal}

Andrew Tanenbaum honored for pioneering MINIX, the OS hiding in a lot of computers

linux.conf.au Sydney 2007

Andrew Tanenbaum's keynote was introduced by Linus Torvalds.

AST's enduring contribution might well be the effect of his various text books have had on their readers.

I would think Linux is one such example. Minix was possibly the only open source posix~ish OS at that time. Even Coherent was closed source and BSD mired in an attritional law suit. I will always remember booting a 5.25" minux floppy on a 80186 PC with two visual 102 terminals connected to the two com ports and being able to run multiple logins. Clearly PC hardware was capable of more than msdos single tasking or Windows 2.0 cooperative multitasking.

I guess with the advent of the 80386 and enough people working on open source including minix Linus provided the spark that ignited the tinder of an explosion (big bang:) of FOSS creativity that dominates modern computing.

One thing I do recall about AST was that I received a reply, after emailing him, concerning the source of a quote in Modern Operating Systems. As it turned out he wasn't exactly sure of its exact origin. (I think I traced it to St Exupery's writings.)

I was rather impressed that he took the trouble to reply.

A well deserved award!