Posts by Bebu 2075 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2022
"Considering the first thing it would have done is try to lick itself clean/dry."
Very occasionally you get a Pigpen of a cat that is a grubby scruff which usually gets cleaned by the other cats. In that case the vat diver would have spread the joy around and possibly survived.
Pretty indestructable but not in the honeybadger class.
From the Nekochan site (SGI Irix software) one of the few words of japanese I know is neko (cat.:)
I suspect chromed-neko is now as defunct as SGI.
《Pictsies eat unicorns for lunch.》
And doubtless lions for dessert.
"Nae king! Nae quin! Nae laird! Nae master! We willnae be fooled again!
"They can tak' oour lives but they cannae tak' oour troousers!
"Crivens! I kicked meself in ma ain heid!
Some the funniest lines Terry Pratchett's from Discworld were from the nac mac feegles.
I sometimes wonder whether the Tiifany Aching stories or the Ramtops stories will ever be filmed. I can imagine an opportunity to portray Granny Weatherwax would attract the most talented.
《As a Scot, I find that interesting...》
Well, well... I never realized the horned beastie on the coat of arms was Scots.
Scots politics might have it moments but absolutely nothing compared to the current mindless antics of Whitehall where even Jarry's king Ubu would be embarrassed.
I can understand why the mythical creature might want to throw off the chains and to hoof it from the coat of arms. Would look better on a azure background surrounded by a circle of a dozen golden stars. :)
an interview for a junior sysadmin role a good while ago where the interview got to a networking question. They had a [Linux?] load balancing cluster with the front end rewriting the destination (public service) address to one of the cluster members (rfc1918) addresses and the reply, from the scrawled diagram, appeared to leave via another system/device. Apparently wasn't actually working. After exhausting my store of potential reasons - some from the rocking horse shit* category - I was flumoxed. The interview ended.
Only on the my bus back to the motel did the thought arise that I had assumed these network types knew that NATed traffic must be routed symetrically or the two devices that modify the address/ports must comunicate, or at least agree on, the mappings. I suspect they did not.
The whole experience was quite surreal.
* as in rare as....
Who since the extinction of the dinosaurs uses a MTA (or MDA) that they themselves have written? (Eric Allman, Philip Hazel, DJB and Wietse Venema excepted. :)
Sendmail, Exim, Qmail and Postfix should be able to satisfy the most deviant MTA cravings between them.
The only transgression on my part was running the TIS fwtk smap/smapd (Marcus J Ranum) in front of an ancient vendor IDA sendmail.
Once the need to talk to "odd" mail systems uucp, acsnet/mhsnet, csnet etc etc that sendmail pandered to, disappeared, a quick survey of the other offerings quickly landed on the fairly new postfix. Years later I still think postfix is a decent design.
Freebsd still had sendmail standard until v14 but postfix etc were available from packages or ports from 14 it apparently has dma from dragonflybsd.
So I guess that sendmail is finally fading into history.
《That’s because people who look at packet headers are very strange! :)》
Or very soon become so...
Ethereal had an otherworldly feel to it - Wireshark more of a frenetic feeding frenzy.
A sysadmin just needs tcpdump to determine "someone is playing silly buggers here." A shark like visitation will be inflicted on the culprit identified by the mac address, switch port etc.
A bit like the Inquisition - presumed guilty until confession extracted.
《Thales is pronounced Talis》
Surely its the bloody francophones again. :)
I would have probably punted correctly. As a kid in the late 70s there was a b&w french tv series Thierry la fronde with english subtitles where said Thierry was a gallic Robin Hood poncing around in tights but I only remember two things about it 1. deadly dull and 2. Thierry was pronounced Terry (which I thought then was decidedly odd.)
I assumed Thales was named after Thales of Miletus where the greek pronounciation of C6th BCE Miletus would be correct?
Wiki has C5th BCE attic to C5th koine: /tʰa.lɛ̂ːs/ → /θaˈlis/ → /θaˈlis/
The suggested etymology for Thales is "one who thrives" which given the french outfit is largely involved in developing the tools of destruction its probably proper they insist on a distinct pronounciation.
《I'd check the power cord first, followed by checking if there was power at the socket, followed by the power supply itself》
The number of times an august member of faculty (as murcans put it) has sworn that the cord to their PC, Mac etc is plugged into the mains socket/outlet under their desk.
The void under an academic's desk is normally filled with piles of old papers, journals, text books and other discarded paraphernalia with a thick covering of dust and unmentionable cruft so exploratory expeditions were always a last resort. :)
Invariably when such an exploration was undertaken the power plug had been dislodged by something falling down the back of the desk, network cable (TP or coax) looped around the lead and had been pulled, or a wayward boot or falling pile of books, or the desk itself moved in toto etc. The puzzling ones were when the switch was in the off position (and early morning visit by the PFY?)
After a couple of these cases I took to carrying a small mains powered hub which accepted a standard IEC power socket (just for the power led. ;)
"However, there's always that amusing myth about medieval British peasants drinking beer because the water wasn't safe to drink."
William Cobbett in his Cottage Economy (1821) explains in detail the making of beer (ale sans hops.) As I recall the water has to be brought to boiling to extract the malt from matter barley to produce the wort which would also have destroyed most pathogens found in the water. The yeast (barm) is added to the cooled liquid.
From Cobbett's description of "small" beer I would guess it wasn't particularly alcoholic. Records of servants' rather generous daily allowances of small beer dating from the middle ages to his time would lead to the same conclusion.
Before industrialization and urbanization beer was routinely brewed in the great houses and humbler cottage and consumed by all classes and ages.
By the 1820s Cobbett was railing against against the decline of this cottage economy. Very much not keen on tea drinking at least amongst the labouring classes. Of course tea requires boiling water but I think Cobbett was against the extra time required each time of to boil the water, prepare the tea and clean up - he might also have had an inkling of the toxic adulterants added to tea at the time [see Mayhew's writings.]
I don't know about outside the UK. The german states would have had their beer statutes I suppose. Wine would have usually been diluted with water before consumption so unless the wine had disinfectant properties (unfortunately a Iot of wine tastes like it does :) the risk of drinking contaminated water remained.
Normally consumed chilled, warm australian beer tastes like it was drawn straight from the pub's urinal - disgusting!
"Do yourselves a great favour and start to realise that you do inglorious and bankrupting battle in vain against future leading technologies which be designedly quite alien in concept and nature for all manner of very sound reasons and best practices protecting and securing creative core source and raw kernel ore. To do otherwise has one fated to wander and wallow and perish in petrified worlds intent on delivering stagnant growth and terrifying resulting product."
I very nearly understood this twaddle.
When first encountered the verb "to curate" I thought (apparently incorrectly) that it refered to performing curettage.
But having seen the dubious blessing of being curated on so many offerings I might have been on the right track.
The picture of "highly" curated would then bring tears to the eyes just thinking about it.
But would concur with the experience of dealing with big tech.
Can we anticipate similar offerings from the likes of Oracle, IBM (Redhat might offer the red fedora* as the latest fashion accessory), Broadcom, Amazon and Microsoft? Apple has pretty much lived in that space.
Although you could sell tickets to see Larry flouncing down the catwalk modelling his latest haute couture offerings.
* I recall River Song (as Melody Malone) looked rather cute in a black fedora.
《>It's time IT's own late fee model becomes late as in the late Arthur Dent.
Didn't Arthur Dent survive the destruction of Earth itself?》
As far as I recall he managed to survive to the end of all Douglas Adams' books.
He surived Earth's demolition, Vogon poetry (more avoided) and ejection into inter-planetary or -stellar space, the krikkit robots and more so not quite a paradigm of terran mortality.
By his own admission Slartibartfast wasn't particularly good at threats.
Agrajag might be a better model of tenuous existence as Arthur managed end Agrajag's on numerous occasions except possibly in his bowl of petunias incarnation(?)
《The law is there to discourage delinquent behavior when all else fails, not to amplify power for profit. 》
On what planet? Certainly not on planet america. Washington Irving wrote complaining of such legal shenanigans between his compatriots a very long time ago.
Not just in the US, the Law is drafted by those who wish to legitimize their delinquent behaviour in order to amplify their power and profits.
Just downright simplemindedness, not even rising to the level of naivety, to believe otherwise.
The penny dropped that OS/2 never ran in x86 real mode whereas Win 3.0 often did.
I think Charles Petzold's Window's programming book at the time detailed Windows convoluted fiddling with the call/runtime stack when moving memory segments in real mode to emulate the i286. A bit of a dog's breakfast all round.
At that point I ditched Windows after trying Whitewater Group's Actor and Zortech's C++ compilers+MS Win SDK. The primary reason was once you needed more than 64k (or anything outside DGROUP) it was just plain painful as those segments could be moved in memory, unless locked, at any time.
Ironically or exasperatingly some months after ditching the whole MS schmozzle I read an article in Dr Dobbs where the writer had discovered an undocumented feature that allowed the programmer to register an array of segments numbers with windows which windows would update when moving the segment's memory. With C++ you could use this feature to neatly encapsulate this nonsense.
At that point I was done with MS - one of life's unregretted decisions. :)
Some years later I installed OS/2 warp from a cdrom attached to computer magazine (APC July 2000 no. 7 vol. 5) and was actually pleasantly surprised.
Trousers of Time* - unfortunately we all got to know on which side Mr Microsoft dressed. :(
* this use of the phrase pre-dates Terry Pratchett's Discworld use for the Everettian Many Worlds interpretation.
1960s BBC Radio "Professor Prune and The Electric Time Trousers" travelled the universe in the Time Trousers encountering dreadful jokes. (Alas generally called "life.")
《And like many young people, he didn’t always think things through very well.》
I can think of a couple of US presidents, not all geriatrics, of whom this could also be said.
Lets invade Iraq and Afganistan! ......... .......... .......... ........... ...........
Well that didn't work out as well as we might have wished, but as we could quite conceivably have foreseen.
If the satellite were just using a source of electricity (solar etc) and accelerating electrons out the back for thrust, the craft would have an increasingly net positive charge which is going to make it harder and harder to shove negative electrons out the exhaust.
The trick is to shove the same number of +ve and -ve ions out the exhaust (the more massive the better.)
My guess is that the satellite is intended to scoop up the very thin air by its rapid passage through that air (by virtue of its orbital velocity - very considerable at 50km to 90km), then ionizing the captured gases into a plasma, separating the -ve and +ve ions with static magnetic field(s)*, then accelerating☆ these two ion streams out the exhaust. Once accelerated the two ion streams could be recombined, or not, before leaving the exhaust as its only the total momentum (mass×velocity) that matters.
The $64 question is whether the whole propulsion system can ever produce more thrust than the drag the craft experiences. If you could produce oodles more thrust then you could have powered flight outside the constraints of purely orbital motion. Even hover or linger over a particular geographical location. :)
The whole idea isn't all that different from the various interstellar ram scoop drives of my childhood scifi reading.
* charged particles moving in a static magnetic field experience a force perpendicular to both the field and direction of motion (the force experienced by +ve ions is opposite to that of -ve ions) note no work is done by the magnetic field.
☆ I think a pair of any type of presumably linear particle accelerators would suffice.
《So hey guys come and train as a steam engine driver, get a genuine 1970s salary.》
You would get a thousandfold more takers. The 70s salary would be icing as just about every trainee would happily pay for the privilege. Who as a kid didn't want to be a locomotive driver? Casey Jones tv series.
Some of the Multicians might be attracted to IBM big iron but I suspect they had a bit more class. ;)
《basically you need to fool your PC onto thinking it both is and isn't installed》
Very quantum superposition of installation states.
MS is/was into quantum computing before going all in on AI.
Although in their case you just know the cat is dead without needing to look. :)
《300 pounds of shit in a 200-pound bag?》
Must be approaching critical shitmass?
A 136kg fusion shit bomb would need a pretty big fan to spread the fallout evenly.
I thought he was just putting on weight but it seems he may have a twisted bowel (volvulus) and there is an accumulation of his frustrated No 2s that haven't yet been verbalized.
《nice little text editor called EasyEdit.》
I remember it from back then. :) It persists on
http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?EASYEDIT_II
Release notes have V4.45 28/6/91
I used mks vi back then but used to try the various editors that were on shareware floppies (and later cdroms.)
《... she's buying a stairway to Heaven
There's a sign on the wall, but she wants to be sure
'Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings》
Ain't that the truth in this game?
《The key swaps would be best done with remotely via software at random intervals 》
Just changing the key repeat rate would be really irritating. I have been working with two decent mechanical keyboards that have a slightly different rates. Swivelling between the two every 5 to 15 minutes this is most annoying.
I know I could fix it in software but in the BOFH line you are used to quickly adapting to the shittiest keyboards and most commonly in quite unpleasant surroundings.
Ended up shoving a remote console on one of the systems.
《Richard Dawkins used a bike combination lock as an example for something in one of his early books. It turns out that he'd used his real number as he got his bike pinched...》
Nah...!
It must have been Tom Baker - with a sonic screwdriver and a motive who needs the combination?
(Probably in company with Douglas Adams.)
Gemm's version of the BOFH with significantly more verbiage and provocation hasn't propelled anyone from a window.
Suicidal if somewhat dense marketing Doris would have been the first to ponder her brand synergy on the way to the car park.
I can see Gemm confusing Lucifer with Gabriel but itself the spawn of the pit might knowingly do so. :)
When I first (mis)read Gemm's effort I thought it was Doris that was sat on BOFH's screen - not her email.
I thought uncharted territory here as I don't recall recall anything remotely erotic let alone kinky in our hero's history.
《As you don't give any range of longitude, that is pretty much - everywhere[1] that we are on the planet.》
My calculation makes it 78.36% of the Earth's surface assuming longitudes 180E to 180W.
Or
0.5 × (long_1° - long_2°)÷360° × [sine (lat_1) - sine (lat_2)]
with E. and N. positive and W. and S. negative.
You would be safe in your igloo. ;)
Even between 30°N and 30°S covers half the globe although I am not sure those latitudes would worry el Rego readers overmuch.
Of the 78% a goodly proportion would be ocean but Sod's laws would drop a couple hundred-weight of debris on a deckchair aboard a luxury Carribean cruise while you were sunbaking.
I can think of a dozen or so world figures whose contributions to history could be improved by having a decent chunk drop on their heads but those are 1 in a million chances that the lady never favours.
is that any black voter in the southern parts is just as likely to be "suppressed" whether he or she were sufficiently deceived by this image or deficient to vote for demented Donald or not.
I can imagine these shenanigans back firing in UK politics. If a fake image portraying sir Keir, more than half cut at an obviously boistrous piss up, surrounded by scantily clad nubiles, were published, I suspect Labour's vote at the next GE would leap. (Worked for Boris. :)
As for the US Presidential race - talk about the old men at the zoo - Demented Donald trumps Al Zheimer.
EL9 wiki.almalinux.org installs and runs on an 8G Pi5. Have to fiddle with images and sd cards but after installing on a usb ssd drive AL9 arm works about the same as installing AL9 x86_64 on a lower end or older x86 notebook.
Useful if you work with (RH)EL or everything else is EL.
I haven't had a chance to really test the Pi5 AL9 install as I have been replacing Cent0S and RHEL installs with AL8.9. Decided to run any RHEL developer installs in VMs as required.
I can imagine the British at Isandlwana having a contingent of Samurai added to the Zulu facing them not appreciating the added diversity and inclusion. :)
These LLM clearly have no effective model of causality, time or history. Not surprising really as we have a contemporary human population equally unemcumbered.
Sauron didn't see two grubs crawl up the slopes of Mt Doom either. ;)
Pehaps big G needs a Palantir? :)
I would have thought this chap would have made himself pretty scarce immediately after he was first queried about his uploads*. I suppose he may have already been under surveillance and would have been prevented from leaving the US.
Cupidity in the clever has the same consequences as stupidity in the less gifted.
*I would have thought a bit of steganography might have saved his bacon - google source files, compress, encrypt, steganographically embed in approved documents.
《AI tech loves picturing women in underwear》
Suppose we should be grateful for the lingerie otherwise we might be distracted when we are searching for an obscure gcc compiler flag. Although many might argue the opposite.
I have to wonder how this tech got the "talkie toasters" over scantily clad women. I can only assume they trained it on the home directories and mail spools of the staff of Microsoft and openAI but then I imagine it would be photoshopping the garments onto those images.
I can understand blokes getting cheesecake but do the gals get beefcake?
All rather silly really.
Wanted to access a resource which asked for a linkedin account.
So created one... what rubbish.
Anyway appears the resource wasn't satisfied with the free account. Sod'm!
Cancelled linkedin. A wasted half hour. :(
《You may reactivate your account within 14 days from today by signing back in》
I don't imagine the need could arise this side of eternity.
What really surprises is that anyone noticed that it had disappeared from the net.
《a supply of blindfolds》
What for?
I know Jeremy Clarkson had an aversion to shooting things in the face but firing squads usually aim lower. :)
A legal system where a claim for USD 6 billion in costs is entertained and isn't an automatic admission to Bedlam is pretty Bodmin itself but we already knew that. :)
《exhibits near-human levels of comprehension》
Often not a big ask. Once had a dog (begian) that had more intelligence than most of surrounding population.
《fluency on complex tasks》
Presumably on linguistic tasks? Don't need much fluency with arc welding only with the flux I imagine.
《leading the frontier of general intelligence.》
General Intelligence - the head of military intelligence (the definitive oxymoron.)
In a couple of years all this will be last year's tulips. :)
I was thinking what LLM might actually be useful for - the obvious one to me was handwriting recognition and probably speech recognition. They are pretty reasonable now but I wonder whether that is the case with non latin scripts and specialist domains like mathematics - would be convenient to be able to enter a p.d.e. like Schroedinger's equations by hand. :)
《Schrödinger's Hardware Failure. Only occurs if no techie is there to observe it.》
While the techie is there its a superposition of <failure| and <non-failure| states which as soon as the techie leaves the site either Murphy or Sod slips in and under whose malign gaze it rapidly collapses into a pure <failure| state.
The quantum Sod's law (or Murphy's.)
《a specific use case for an old, low-powered machine 》
A laptop with a serial port would be favourite.
A small distro and minicom... you are in business. Still a lot of stuff out there with rs232 ports. (25 pin at that :)
My last x86 notebook with a serial port died ages ago only the mac powerbook with a serial port still functional (also with built in modem.)
《Tik tok will suffer the same fate when these kids have kids... What goes around comes around ....》
Yep. No one left on ICQ anymore. ;)
Just when the Royal Mail is closing its last post office and the post boxes are being sent to Steptoe and Son, I suspect the youth of the day will rediscover the art of letter writing, with pen and ink, on decent embossed or water marked paper, or vellum and sent in an equally solid envelope with a tastefully designed postage stamp attatched with a gum (acacia) adhesive. Probably also be a market for sealing wax (if there were any bees left), signet rings and seals.
By then England will probably be a protectorate or republic [odd ordinal english Carolines don't have a great record of longevity] and it might be cheaper to is discard the Royal Mail in toto than to strip out the royal cipher.
Unfortunately there is never a Moist von Ludwig to resurrect moribund organisations as you always seem to get a Bergholt Stuttley Johnson (aka Bloody Stupid Johnson ;)
《News are /reports/ of facts. 》
Only if this were the case. :)
A great deal of news is indeed a report that is not informed by anything resembling, by any reasonable definition, a fact.
Often just waffling partisan opinion of a some semi-literate hack or some prurient beat up of some private embarassment or a tabloid fabrication having no conceivable basis in any reality.
In truth, facts are slippery creatures but Kipling's six honest serving men can assist. The when, where, what and to some extent who can in principle be reported consistently by different parties. The how and why require analysis and evaluation which ultimately even for the honest writer does mean judgement, opinion, and potentially bias and prejudice, of which the intelligent or critical reader is always aware.
An example I like is the hypothetical reporting the destruction of Pompei by eruption of Vesuvius in AD79. The event, its location and date are largely undisputed and can be determined purely through physical means.
The people who perished and those who didn't is a matter of some conjecture but the broad picture is fairly clear.
The "how" is a matter of modern vulcanology but in first century Rome their equivalent of the News of the World would doubtlessly reported that the impious, corrupt and debauched behaviour of the citizens and leaders of Pompei had grieviously offended the god(s) who in retribution had created the eruption thus neatly wrapping both "why" and "how" together - a conflation not unknown to the contemporary fish wrapper.
One of my treasures:
Calendrical Calculations
Nachum Dershowitz and Edward M. Reingold
Cambridge University Press, 1997
First edition but there are a few later editions which would have enlarged on this fascinating topic. Mine came with a cdrom with scheme(lisp) code implementing the book's calculations.
I think the Hobbits had the best calendar - something like 12 months each of 30 days and get blotto for the extra five days - bit like Xmas - NY. Over time probably over-observe the blotto period by the odd day or so that it averages out 5.25 days per year.
The first day of the Hobbit new year started on the same day of the week so calendars and diaries were reusable. :)
Joh Bjelke-Petersen more than most with gems like:
You can’t sit on a fence, a barbed wire fence at that, and have one ear to the ground.
The Canadian environmentalist, David Suzuki, named him the greatest deadhead in the universe at one stage. :)
Australian politicians generally aren't greatly endowed gray matter department, Queensland ones don't even seem to have been waiting in the queue.
For the record Queensland doesn't have daylight saving but the other three eastern states (NSW,VIC,TAS) in the same timezone (UTC+10) do which can be a PITA.
When it mattered to me I just set the watch to UTC and add 12 sub 1 in Sydney and add 12 sub 2 in Brisbane. (remember its modulo 12 :)
A consequence of buggering a couple of watches changing the time backwards and forward.
《Their natural body clocks seem to lengthen to a period of more like 26-27 hours.》
One such experiment was deep underground - with no natural day night forcing.
Nuclear powered submarine would be another good environment in which to test this but in practice a normal 24 hour day would be maintained I imagine.
《Americans served beer in jugs, so they got a jug each.》
They also serve beer in jugs in AU but the jug is shared otherwise the beer would become too warm to drink which probably wouldn't bother les matelots anglais.
Don't they have small aluminium kegs (10kg) in tge US and UK?
I recall reading about scrumpy in the early '80s and it seemed to barely avoid breaking the chemical weapons conventions. The basic idea appears to be take a large quantity of very strong, unpleasantly rough and otherwise undrinkable alcoholic cider, and then adulterate that with unmentionable, normally undisclosed, additions.
Hydrofluoric acid sounded a better choice of tipple. :)
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