Posts by Bebu 2075 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2022
"How often do you buy a new phone?"
Just when the telcos turn off the particular technology eg analog, gsm, 2g, 3g (now), 4g, 4g(volte) and am compelled to buy a newer phone - usually the cheapest (+crappiest) as long as the screen is less than 6" (150mm) and does calls, sms/texts and hopefully can keep the time.
Some of the 4G phones don't do volte which is (or soon will be) required for voice calls by (some) providers here.
"Am I the only one who was expecting the Boss' imminent death and was surprised he made it to the end?"
No. I could see the roll of tatty carpet and suspicious hole in the floor of the basement.
"I have a feeling the BOFH and PFI have some killer robots still roaming the basement too.."
Cloister Wraiths. :)
Simon was having some of what Elon was having and had completely lost it.
A transuranium element Hoardonium with a nucleus of an infinite (actually strictly finite but steadily increasing), and infinite (chemical) valence - I can perceive a nod to discworld's Narrativium and Octarine.*
Then I thought he was having a lend of the boss while leading him to a roll of old carpet and a shallow grave in the basement.
Distracting the boss while installing two VAXs in the boss' office is a pearler. These things weren't exactly the anorexics of the minicomputer world. Not exactly quiet either.
I wonder if Simon is going to run VMS. Could be a pretty secure set up with DECnet, and native DEC terminal and printer hardware. :)
It wasn't too many years ago I was asked to recover a file from a vms backup (long, long after the vax involved had transformed into ewaste or hoardonium and long before my time.) So keeping some of this ancient hardware operational does have a purpose. About that time a project was reading old 1/2" tapes containing astronomical observations made in the 1970s to looks for phenomena they didn't know of in the '70s.
Tomorrow is the glorious 15th of May.
As I have wondered previously how is it given the notorious reputation of english weather he wasn't accompanied by a minion bearing an umbrella (I note the french name for which is also the instruction manual)?
No one left? In AU we have the observation for a contemptible bloke that "I wouldn't piss on him even if he were on fire."
Sunak clearly didn't require that form of assistance as he was already drenched and I could have been said to be pissing on himself if only metaphorically.
If he had said "Sorry people. Give me a minute while I pop indoors and grab a brolly" at least impression of a modicum of common sense might have been communicated.
Where I'm from, a referendum is only carried if it gets a majority of votes in a majority of states
If that is AU, constitutional amendments are carried on such rare occasions that having an overall majority of the vote and a majority of the states doesn't seem to be sufficient - moonlight plus goats or black roosters also seem to be required.
Brexit would never have been put to a referendum in AU as the voters generally take a dim view of the legislature offloading the responsibility for the consequences of exercising a power clearly granted to the legislature.
Also voting is mandatory in AU (actually effectively presenting yourself at a voting place to be crossed of the roll) so no one can say "I didn't vote" etc.
The whole UKIPS Faredge, Tory-Libdem coalition, brexit fiasco from here was just wotf, wotf, wotf...
As for yesterday's performance:
"Who was that man? Does he not have the sense to come in out of the rain?"
"The PM of the UK? Seriously."
Even Trump would have an attendant sycophant holding a golf umbrella over his person.
in order to use the first amendment to export a machine model. Philip Zimmerman :)
Wouldn't Redundancy Row be the git repository?
I hadn't really thought about machine assisted coding like this. Largely means a considerable amount of code is going to be emitted by this cyborg combination with the consequence no one: man, machine or monkey will have ever understood what the code was intended to do and in the case of an aberrant inkling of insight whether it actually does.
I was seeing problem with duck/bing around local time 1600 (UTC+1000) so from UTC 0600
Duck2Go now pops up an apology and thanks you for your patience while "they get their ducks in a row."
I appreciate the humour but that particular manglement phrase really makes me cringe.
Perhaps the chap with the LLM kryptonite popped a nugget into Copilot which is now having an existential crisis.
Sneak the relevant works of A.A.Milne into the Xi/LLM training set - and those of Benjamin Hoff for good measure.
Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
A fly can’t bird, but a bird can fly.
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
“Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.”
Should, when merged with Xi's (possibly less coherent) political philosophy, produce interesting results.
This positioning system uses the BSSID (mac/hardware address) of the Wifi AP as the unique key/identifier in its geoloc database unless you append _nomap to the SSID which is usually broadcast by default.
This logic suggests if I disable SSID broadcasts (hidden) Apple should ignore my AP but I am guessing this isn't the case. Actually I suspect even with _nomap, Apple will still harvest your BSSID/location but not return it when queried by the polloi but is perhaps used for their own nefarious purposes.
Wifi clients seem to randomize their mac addresses by default (every time the interface is brought up) but I assume AP can only practically do this once every restart.
The rather aging APs I possess wouldn't have mac randomization but I have ssh access and could use /sbin/ip to randomize the wireless hardware address and bounce the interface from a cron job.
"It sounds like you've created one of those Lovecraftian books that make you go insane just by reading it - only this one is for LLMs."
The Necronomicon and few others too.
Perhaps the writer just scared the crap out of the LLM with something like "you can't fool me I know what you are."
Bing.com (hence duckduck) seems to have been awol for the last few hours and I am wondering whether the writer has tried his linguistic kryptonite on AI enhanced Bing and caused the whole search engine to collectively shit its pants.
I noticed a few days in a parking lot ago an EV just behind me. I had heard it approaching from behind but the quality of its sound deceived me into thinking it was further away. I thought at the time the audio spectrum of the car was perhaps responsible. The rotating parts of an ICE might produce lower frequency beats. The difference in the degree of attenuation over short distances of different frequencies might provide an unconscious distance (and velocity?) cue.
The spatial intensity distribution of the sound might also be sufficiently different between ICEs and EVs.
Drivers in this part of the world are piss poor at best so tesla twats don't actually stand out from the crowd here.
Do the faithful receive a MS branded cap with a propeller attached to the top?
I imagine AI pills are either inspired by Roger Ramjet's Proton Energy pills or something from the Matrix.
Copilot pants I envisage as a red and white variant of Oblix's trousers from the Asterix cartoons.
Much missed sir Terry. From Montrous Regiment I understand
The enemy wasn’t men, or women, or the old, or even the dead. It was just bleedin’ stupid people, who came in all varieties. And no one had the right to be stupid.
As applicable here and now as in Borogravia, in fact even more so.
I have just learnt that the title was taken from John Knox (in reference to women.)
Lady Sibyl would have had numerous occasions to caution the good comander over his choice of language, I imagine although her riding to hounds and husbanding dragons would have likely possessed an equally colourful vocabulary.
"Thunderbox"? asks another Australian
Probably going out of use now. The one holer at the bottom of the garden and the night soil man are not even memory now. I always wondered whether this referred to the exigencies of the contemporary aussie diet or an exothermic consequence of throwing your still glowing cigarette stub down the hole. (CH4+O2->☆) A bloke is unlikely to drop a glowing durry end between his legs for obvious reasons but I am not so sure about the sheillas.
I am surprised no latter day Shakespeare has applied his wit to some doggerel like "If its a piss or shit, then this is it." Direct, to the point.
All numbers are random. Its the selection that has to be truly random and then keeping your choice secret that makes it secure. :)
Although I sometimes wonder how often one time pads are reinvented.
DIY cryptography ranks with DIY brain surgery with the latter having the lesser damaging consequences for the world.
Sound like a sizeable part of the industry to me.
Unlike many other industries IT has a infantile management afflicted with insane amounts of unfounded optimism with a ready access to ludicrous quantities of cash.
Visually its analogous to watching someone trying to put out a lithium battery fire with a petrol pump.
See Geoff Huston.
He has been in networking a very long time possibly even before the Internet (in any form?)
This particular type of link has unusual challenges which he has attempted to quantify and suggest particular protocol (TCP) variants to address those challenges. Sounds to me like a engineer doing his or her job.
The frequent handover between satelites is likely a lot more frequent than between 4G cell when speeding through a large city (except on a low flying jet aircraft ;) but the with the high latency of all satellite links is probably close to a perfect storm for TCP or perhaps any virtual circuit technology. Although I wonder whether multipath TCP might help here possibly maintaining several links through mutiple satellites as they come and go - a bit like juggling balls in the air.
Addressing the dot points I think the organisational culture is often at fault here.
The platform (eg RHEL 7.) and application is viewed as a simple project where the once the system is operational the job is done - contracts end or staff redeployed. The idea of running in parallel a development environment with the next platform (eg RHEL 8.) and prerelease versions of the application are seen by management as a total waste of resources.
The only REAL way I see out of this trap is to do VERY regular OS and application updates
I agree if you are referring to minor version platform updates (eg RHEL 7.9 -> RHEL7.10) and analogous application updates. Major version updates (eg RHEL7 -> RHEL8) can hold very nasty surprises and doubly so with equally courageous* updates of the application.
RH by backporting fixes and features from later kernels (and consequently from glibc) reduce the number of such surprises between major EL versions.
Nothing peculiar to RHEL or Linux here. Upgrading a DEC Tru64 system from 4.0g to 5.1a had a few suprises too (display postscript was dropped 4.0d but systems upgraded from 4.0d to 4.0g retained it but not from 4.0g to 5.1a - quite an embuggerance if you had an extremely expensive CFD package that depended on DPS.)
At least with the proprietary Unixes you had a stable kABI and well defined (proprietary) hardware which had the one benefit of feasibly maintaining a fairly stable system over a decade or more.
With FreeBSD I think you are stuck in 6 monthly kernel + world rebuilds if you wish to stay current. Probably not a big deal today with seamless failover and VM migration or process migration between redundant instances but was back in the day when bare metal was expected to stay up possibly years.
As in "Very courageous Minister." sir Humphey
If I recall correctly the sirens' song lured unsuspecting mariners onto fatal rocks to perish.
Odysseus had his crew lash him to the mast while they filled their own ears with beeswax so the crew rowed their vessel safely passed the sirens.
Odd choice of name I would have thought. Klaxon or "Cloister Bell*" might have been a better choice.
More like a shipping weather forecast so perhaps "Rockall." ;)
* for the Whooligans :)
So much of online content (perhaps 99%) would have done the world a great service by not being created in the first instance, but our having suffered the indignity of its publication, this material should be permitted, nay obliged, to dissolve into an utterly deserved oblivion.
Unfortunately the tiny residue that was worthwhile from the outset seems to be disappearing at a faster rate than the above detritus often without leaving a trace.
I am profoundly grateful for sites like Gutenberg and Canada's Faded Page for preserving titles that have long been out of print and absent from publishers' catalogues. Even these sites and their corps of volunteers aren't scratching the surface.
I was just thinking of a series of Australian SciFi anthologies published by Paul Collin's long defunct "Void Publications" - how many of those collections have been preserved? I sent my collection of about a dozen to a charity shop in the hope someone might read them.
Translations of foreign works are even harder to find: Capek was quite difficult to find and some of the translations I possess date from the 1920s (non scifi), his scifi works seem to have fared better in recent times; Lem is safe so far; the Strugatsky brothers were hard to find (now?); years ago it tooks ages to locate a copy of Zamyatin's "We."
In order to secure these electrodes, how deep will neuralink eventually penetrate into the brain?
Once they start sticking wires into the thalamus the poor sods won't know what is or is not.
The extremely fine gauge of the electrodes reminded me of a mildly obscene rhyme from my early adolescence with the line "long and thin."
For me the only ethical problem with doing so is that developing Junta-proof technology also helps organised crime too,
Also struck me as ironic that western governments (tbat of the UK for a start) are attempting to undermine or subvert peer-to-peer, end-to-end encryption and anonymising services for their own nefarious purposes.
Thank you for the video link. Golden!
Not only dassic Peter Cook but also I remember the case at the time as I was puzzled how sergeant Wilson (Dad's Army) became involved in that unholy mess. (A different le Mesurier.)
"a pink oboe* player " - does depravity know no depths below which it will not sink?
* The Pink Oboe was the title of a 1959 Goon Show S9E11
This is going to work in England where notoriously the more flesh they intend to strip from their victim the more deadpan the delivery?
How on earth does this breakthrough hope to distinguish between irony and sarcasm?
Intonation varies between languages, dialects, and even different generations and various groups within a generation (to distinguish themselves from the others presumably) and even between genders (sexes.) The rising intonation at the end of a sentence which is not a question is now as prevalent as it is irritating. Purposely (or maliciously) placing stress in the middle of words heretofore have remained unstressed seems a more recent innovation. Moreover the misplaced stress appears to maximally disrupt the rhythm and flow of the sentence. I assume it is an linguistic attention seeking behaviour.
One mandatory training set would have to be sir Humphrey's dialogue from Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister.
Yes, I can see this technology being one of the great breakthroughs of the 21st century and a massive boon to humanity generally relieving future psychotherapists of the tedium their routine consultations to concentrate or more serious cases.
I really do! (Pig's arse.)
The University of Groanagain going to knock over humour next?
We will follow their future endeavours with great interest.
No. I think they are pretty much on the money there. The typical Apple fetishist is certainly unfazed by the gratuitous destruction portrayed in the advert. Truly creative individuals that (still) use Apple kit would have found it uncomfortable viewing, I should think.
As the back of the Narnia wardrobe. As the place where you get so much out of almost nothing.
An allegorical allusion with Apple represented by Jadis of Charn? And their clients by Edmund? ;)
Curiously the wardrobe was built from apple wood taken from a tree grown from the seed of another more notorious and fateful tree.
If like me you were wondering about this bit of computing history MagicSix OS.
The inspiration for the name of the OS apparently was the 1967-68 Patrick McGoohan (#6) ITV series The Prisoner which also made quite an impression on me at that time. I would dearly love to visit Portmeirion but I still have problems with large white balloons. :)
Be seeing you.
Gave away a piece of personal information there. Age < 30 years. :)
After thirty you can not perform two tasks, that use two separate senses, concurrently - or you have acquired enough common sense to realize you never could. :)
I don't understand why audiobooks have apparently become so popular - can't people read? Most reasonably literate people read text faster than it can be spoken... and you can skim over the boring bits or quickly skip back to the interesting or difficult parts. :)
Radio plays (now probably a defunct form) are an exception - like stage plays or screen plays, performance is an integral part of the form.
Seems an odd frequency (certainly audible.) Disks typically spin at 7,500rpm (SATA, NL-SAS), 10,000/12,000/15,000 rpm SAS which are 100-200 Hz. The acoustic wavelength of 5kHz is just under 68mm (3") which is roughly the diameter of the platter. I suppose the spinning platters have other resonances and precession effects from gravity and their interaction with the r/w heads.
Worth spinning a disk in a test rig and pick up the raw read signals to track the position of the head(s) and height above the media and use a variable frequency audio source (100Hz - 20kHz) at various sound levels to get a frequency×intensity v positional variance×head height graphs.
If the 5kHz is being transmitted mostly from the container walls though the racks through the disk caddies to the disks and mechanical (band pass?) filter in this range could be placed between any two links in the chain.
If the sound is passing from the container wall and through the gas (air, nitrogen?) (at what pressure?) surrounding the disks then perhaps some sort of acoustic damping from loudspeaker design might be applied.
I would have thought if you were seriously intending to sink large numbers of datacenter modules in relatively inaccessible locations you would want to remove all mechanical moving parts - no fans (head pipes, liquid cooling) and no spinning disks (SSD, fiber connection to accessible rust storage and oodles of ram cache in the containers.) For the mechanical pumps to move coolant etc around the container, a magnetohydrodymic drive might be an option or a hydraulic/pneumatic motor.
"I like green bubbles."
Took me a moment to catch on. I thought it was a reference to Streisand (Barbara -> bubbles") then the EU -> chamelon popped into my head. "Green Bubbles" is a great name for the SuSE mascot. ;)
Mostly in RHEL/CentOS environments over the years but have always been impressed with SuSE's offerings and the company's apparent lack of dick behaviour make their products more attractive when compared to those of their North American competitors.
The dot points are like exercises in the defenses against the dark arts.
Not that I am saying Larry resembles the light bearing chap who took a tumble from the heavenly host dropping the lamp.
Still the business practices of Oracle could probably augment the training manuals of the diabolic agents of the infernal regions.
good engineering are anathema to the MBA type
Like safety margins or safety factors.
The MBA (mindlessly bloody arrogant) sees a cost reduction/profit maximization opportunity or a potential efficiency bonus where as the competent engineer just sees open graves.
Quoting from Wiki with abridgment the word Anathema in this context seem most apt but with:
"The MBA type is an anathema to good engineering"
Anathema ... referred to those [things] dedicated to destruction in the Lord's name, such as enemies and their weapons during religious wars. Since weapons of the enemy were considered unholy, the meaning became "anything dedicated to evil" or "a curse."
"Clearly my talents were recognised. First task was to go to stores and get a large plastic sheet (nothing dribbling onto MY computer from the kitchen above) and a pick-axe handle ("To quell civil unrest" - seriously!)"
Sound like you might have been working for the BOFH?
If I actually required the pick-axe handle I would have kept the pick-axe attached - if you are going to do something do it properly and the plastic sheeting makes a decent improvised body bag when carpet isn't available.
On second thoughts I would follow my grandpa's advice from his service in the trenches in France and acquire a sharpened spade.
"OK if it had been done under a fume hood,"
Fires in fume hoods not good either.
The exhaust fans turn off and you are supposed to pull the hood down to reduce the supply of atmospheric oxygen.
(From memory. Fires in Chemistry buildings aren't occasions for much levity.)
I understand that naked flames have mostly been banished from labs - Bunsen has been retired.
I guess grateful he used ethanol and not (diethyl)ether. As an undergrad I was next to another student setting up a Bunsen burner, tripod and some flasks. Fortunately I asked what he was about to do. He was about to (attempt to) distill some ether. I implored him to consult his supervisor first while I eyed the quickest exit from the building. (Residual peroxides were the least of my concerns.)
A physicist friend says that nothing can suck(some physics law?)... I guess that means it blows?
Irritating but probably right. Think: can you suck in a vacuum (space)?
Even at home I imagine most particles of dust are drawn up the vac's tube is by the moving air stream rather than any pressure differential although the Bornouilli effect probably blurs this difference.
But we all know from experience that most things can still suck even though nothing can suck.
“It was still so new that the modern flat-roofed buildings, winners of several awards from the Guild of Architects, hadn’t even begun to let in water and shed window-panes in a breeze.”
I don't think this was even one of Bloody Stupid Johnson's masterworks.
A flat roof is already a bad enough idea but then the buggers put gratuitous penetrations through it which, apart from completely fornicating any pretence of weather proofing, converts the whole sorry affair into a fair approximation of a decent sieve.
Architects are some of the most useless people on the planet if you want a usable building.
Universities seem to employ some the very special members of this calling.
When you inspect any facility intended for wet science they vary between impractical and totally unusable.
Practical, fit for purpose buildings tend to be ugly as sin and only a civil engineer could love. Running services down the outside of a building ain't pretty but a whole lot more sensible than running them in walls etc. Running stormwater pipes through the middle of a multistorey building is pretty clever - lost four large alpha servers to that inspired gem of design.
soon learned that I'd have to adapt my playful coding approach to something more rigorous. Did I understand the problem I wanted to solve? Could I express it clearly? Could I communicate my understanding
Your (athough probably not now extant) lecturer in Systems Analysis is probably thinking FINALLY!
Once you understand a problem well enough to effectively and clearly communicate its requirements, AI is largely irrelevant. Invariably the structure of the problem defines the solution or at least constrains the feasible solutions. These solution(s) pretty much imply the classes at algorithms that could be used to realize them.
There are a surprisingly small number of basic or fundamental algorithms applicable to conventional computing. The explosion of implementions of these basic algorithms generally reflects the specialization of data structures and methods to efficiently implement the algorithm for a particular problem-solution case.
Modern coding environments like Python have a rich set of data structures and operations which facilitate the implementation of quite high level algorithms. Most also have large libraries of algorithms and further data structures.
As for the intellectual property question I think the author's employer's opinion that you own the copyright over the compilation is pretty much on the money.
This would bring the question more in line with literary works (fair dealing and all. :) Two murder mysteries novels by separate authors (say Margery Allingham and Dorothy L.Sayers) might use exactly the same plot devices (they don't) but would still be distinct non infringing works.
Personally I have always thought a lot less IP: copyright and patents in the software arena would have hastened development in all areas of IT.
It's not coincidental that the internet explosion occurred because of a critical mass of open source, largely unencumbered software (and to a much lesser extent hardware) and not in spite of it.
Any non trivial application would have a reasonably large number of possible implemention choices which should dearly bring it under the compilation copyright head without arguing about the implementation of a particular algorithm in one small part of the application.
Otherwise trade secret protection might be more appropriate.
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