Posts by Bebu

'I’m sorry for everything...' Facebook's Zuck apologizes to families at Senate hearing

Re: Yep.

《Because, you know, 11-year-olds are abducted from Target all the time.》

I remember that in future if I have any irritating rugrats in tow. Suppose it has to be Chez Target? KMart not de rigeur with child abduction community? Lower quality stock?

Really is insane when its obvious that the world is becoming noticeably more dangerous for everyone. Extreme weather events in one years probably account for child harm than a whole decade of lurking department store abductors without even considering anything firearm related.

Cloudflare sheds more light on Thanksgiving security breach in which tokens, source code accessed by suspected spies

Re: “incorrectly believed those tokens were unused”

《Key management can be a complex issue. Imagine an SSH client key gets compromised, or retired, or otherwise invalidated: are you sufficiently on top of your machine inventory to be able to go through every authorized_keys file to be sure that key has been scrubbed from all of them?

Remember, it’s not just real machines, but virtual ones and containers as well.》

I think this is one reason ssh certificate based authentication is recommended. Just a lot of work to set up a SSH CA and issue/renew certs for a smallish site.

Wikileaks source and former CIA worker Joshua Schulte sentenced to 40 years jail

Voltaire that said the most dangerous thing to be is right when the people around you are wrong?

《Il est dangereux d'avoir raison dans des choses où des hommes accrédités ont tort.》

"It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong."

Quoted from Wkiquotes

"Catalogue pour la plupart des écrivains français qui ont paru dans Le Siècle de Louis XIV, pour servir à l'histoire littéraire de ce temps," Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1752)

Voltaire also wasn't overly impressed by the treatment of admiral Byng.

Return-to-office mandates boost company profits? Nope

awesome open-office synergy and productivity.

In my experience ghastly for infection control. These mostly unvaccinated young whippersnappers seem to collect an unenviable array of respiratory (and GI) infections which they gleefully share with their work colleagues.

I noticed that during the mandated WFH period the wider availability of video conferencing meant that there was an expectation of "instant on" availability which there wasn't previously when ones office had to be located - situated (in)conveniently located behind the aircon facilities room so scratch the limited of intellect and the congenitally lazy ie ~99%. Fortunately my WFH internet was fast enough for vpn and ssh but not for teams or zoom. (Odd that? What? :)

Lab work is harder to do at home.

Some of the reagent/chemical deliveries might invite an dawn visit from Mr Plod. :)

Actually just about anything in the bio- and chemical sciences line would violate a slew of regulations before even considering urban planning restrictions.

I imagine a physicist with TeV particle accelerator in the backyard might not be too popular.

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

Re: I once had ....

《I still have a roll of RG-58 thinnnet and BNCs. I use them to make RF jumper leads))》

And a couple of BNC 50ohm terminators in my pocket (binary searc) and short (150-200mm) BNC cables to restore connectivity when some genius had abstracted his workststion from his office (oddly never she.)

10Base2 seemed optimum numpty bait. The chap who grabbed the 75ohm coax from his HP workstation B&W monitor to replace an ethernet connection really deserved defenestration. Twisted pair probably saved decades of support time in a few years. 10Base5 was probably too intimidating - a whack to back of head with 500mm chunk of thicknet carries a lot of conviction and the sharp end of a vampire tap could serious mess with your wellbeing if used with malice and aforethought.

Repeaters, bridges, routers and gateways were somehow more real back then and you certainly learnt the differences between each rather quickly if unintentionally.

Dems and Repubs agree on something – a law to tackle unauthorized NSFW deepfakes

Meanwhile....

This nugget: "How internet anonymity allows toxic trolls to express their 'true' psychopathic tendencies" made the local airwaves.

"No shit Sherlock. Remind me, how much we pay you for these gems?"

But seriously the paper published recently behind this puff piece does try to quantify this.

Consequently I don't see how this legislation can ever prevent your garden variety nutjob with a copy of Paintshop (or whatever) from illustrating and publishing his, her or their sordid fantasies apart from the fact it is an indecent assortment of nutjobs having the required insight doing the legislatin'.

Singtel does the 'we’re building datacenters to host Nvidia clusters’ thing

Misread the caption...

I misread the rebranding as Nixera which was a little more forthright than I might have expected from the owners of Optus. Nix in this part of the world usually mean "nothing", "zilch", "a void" so a company providing support for latest crop of e-Tulips (AI/LLM) that proclaims itself as the "Era of Nothing" might be refreshing and prophetic.

Things are going to get weird as the nanometer era draws to a close

Re: Weird is as weird does

《...whenceforthwithwhile the entangled state of superposed Shannon information is simultaneously everywhere, and nowhere, until observed by a sober party. Beyond that point, it'll be either live turtles all the way down, or bowls of spicy turtle soup, also all the way down,...》

A nod to Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" - "Shenanegans Woke?"

Reminds me of Douglas Adams' "Infinite Improbability Drive" and Trillian's countdown on "The Heart of Gold" to normality:

"We have normality, I repeat we have normality." ... "Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem."

Can the foundaries cope?

In the ångström era the demand for the funny A and Os (å, ö, Å) might exceed the exceed the foundaries' capacity to produce them.

OpenAI's GPT-4 finally meets its match: Scots Gaelic smashes safety guardrails

Re: Getting 'Dangerous' Info from GPTx

《people with actual chemistry knowledge》

A rather mature inorganic chemist stated that it was fairly easy to construct a powerful device from the uncontrolled chemicals easily obtainable from a hardware chain store. As he was never one for exageration I imagine its quite true. He described how to prepare Raney nickel which apparently was quite useful to anyone planning a little arson.

I would consult (paper) chemistry texts rather some Anarchistic Elizabeth David wannabe. Fortunately those with the knowledge (chemists etc) have a more constructive and positive view of life whereas the ignorant and stupid are fortunately mostly a danger to themselves.

Windows 3.11 trundles on as job site pleads for 'driver updates' on German trains

Re: if it ain't broke, don't fix it

《Nuke plants to rely on PDP-11 code UNTIL 2050!》

At least with the CPU you could make one with a very small FPGA, core memory is pretty robust but could in principle be manufactured today. When I was a student long ago I worked out how build a pdp-11 out of standard TTL components from the Fairchild TTL Data Book (1978?) not too difficult. Naively I was going to microcode it so it would have been rather slow. :( Any Uni with a small teaching fab could knock off a truckload of LSI-11s.

The instruction set was quite nice and macro11 wasn't too shabby. If the whole lot runs in core thats probably only 64K code plus 64K data at most so hardly a bloated java app.

Just a thought....

The WfW 3.11 software might run (better) under OS/2 :)

Hold the Hobbes decomm ;)

Probably runs quite well under some version of Wine/Linux.

Fortunately I was well and truly in the Unix camp when WfW 3.1 came along. :)

Re: Improvement?

"KNOWING COBOL AND AIDA IS GOING TO FUND MY RETIREMENT IN 2037"

Dealing with camels on stage will still be a bugger in 2037 I suspect. :)

You aren't the skinny chap with the scythe? The last time he retired the wheels rather fell off.

Robots with a 'Berliner Schnauze' may appear more trustworthy to locals

I would be concerned...

if the study participents found an Austrian dialect more trustworthy or authorative than either standard german or the Berlin dialect.

Queen's german - sorry I didn't quite get it other than by analogy with the (late) Queen's english. Kaiserin Deutsch doesn't seem to ring any bells. All the historical Kaiserinnen were consorts unlike ERII so would have been Kaisers Deutsch I imagine.

Just struck me that VRI spoke German en famille and I believe retained an accent.

If you use AI to teach you how to code, remember you still need to think for yourself

Altogether exasperating...

In hindsight I think the Uni courses that taught coding into a language were starting with wrong end of the horse.

(In my case Fortran IV, Snobol, Algol and later Pascal. C was accidental - I picked up an early copy of K&R "The C Programming Language" that had been shipped with a Z80 Cromix system.)

I think much of the time could have been better spent on teaching first order logic and the basics of formal specification as well as the basics ideas of computational linguistics - syntax and semantics.

For example later understanding the statement syntax of Pascal (cf C) would remove the confusion over the use of semicolons.

As a BOFH I have had students knocking on my door with their non working code that didn't understand de morgans laws (duals) ie they believed ".not. (A .and. B) = (.not. A .and. .not. B)." Ye gad did ye no try substituting "true" for A and B?" Clearly didn't understand the idea "satisfied in all models."

Another area that prefigures coding is an introduction to the study of algorithms. With a handle on basic algorithms a student can analyse a problem using higher level concepts like searching, sorting etc without considering too many implementation details.

Rather than foisting the current AI miasma onto students I would repurpose existing tools like proof checkers, executable specification systems, declarative and functional programming systems to target teaching introductory software engineering courses.

Why wouldn't you exit a loop with a goto, return etc? (One) answer: you are unlikely to have preserved the loop invariant or know whether the loop guard is negated (~G or Inv.) I could not convince a very smart and experienced software developer that this perspective had any merit. Probably it was fortunate we were on the ground (and only) floor in case the BOFH genes had kicked in. :)

Fifty years on, Edsger Dijkstra must be rotating in his grave, we appear to have made bugger all progress. If anything software and systems development is going backwards at warp speed.

Oracle quietly extends Solaris 11.4 support until 2037

If you were "stuck" on Solaris 10...

I noticed no one mentioned IllumOS, an open source derivitive of Sun's Opensolaris (from Solaris-10.)

If you were running in house Sol-10 applications on amd64/x86_64 hardware then a IllumOS based distribution like OpenIndiana is likely to be binary compatible. Whether Oracle software would run under IllumOS is a $64 question.

Porting software from Sol-10/sparc to amd64 is more likely to be more successful than to another OS eg Linux, *bsd.

I know of an attempt to port scientific software to Linux from Solaris which after six months and 10s of $K was abandoned.

In any case at the price, worth looking at. :)

One person's shortcut was another's long road to panic

dramatic foreshadowing

in this case closer to a spoiler as the inevitable pratfall lacking only the fatal flaw. A symlink - who'd a thunk it?

Users fusermount-ing dodgy file systems where they oughtn't has also caused a few tears before teatime.

Bloody users - should be banned or at least the "clever" ones. The dumb one aren't clever enough and the smart ones are smart enough not to be clever or at least to ask beforehand.

It took Taylor Swift deepfake nudes to focus Uncle Sam, Microsoft on AI safety

Apart from any legislation likely being ineffectual...

Non consensual sharing of private or intimate material probably should attract sanction even in the absence of image or audio manipulation whether by AI or more manual techniques.

Where an individual has published or made material generally available there ought to be an overriding enforceable requirement that such material can only be further disseminated substantially intact, unaltered and without any misrepresentation (of context say.)

So grafting Ms Swift's head on to the torso of another athletic miss would not be acceptable nor gafting the head of Suella on to the torso of Ms Swift which even ignoring the incredible bad taste should also be unacceptable.

Oddly enough very recently one of our state MP was subject to a slightly more benign altered image even if there is an element of me too about the complaint it is still an unacceptible practice.

In the end the ability of modern computing power and AI/LLM to generate images or voices etc that to humans look and sound so alike as to be practically indistinguishable but are in fact are demonstrably different will impede the efficacy of any legislation.

A prurient imagination make me wonder what a fully computer generated porn industry would look like - fluffers would be redundant for a start, as would the "talent" I imagine except possibly a few computer as artists' models or inspiration. Like the six million dollar man "we have the technology" more or less. With total automation the "victims" would be the consumers and those affected by the possibly altered perceptions and behaviour of those consumers.

I am surprised Musk hasn't invested in this as he has the branding. :)

(If the Tesla self driving software is any indication it would be a very brave man who purchased an X branded cybernetic sex doll.:)

Microsoft signals expansion of APAC datacenter fleet with 'land acquisition' hire

Morbid imagination.

"strong knowledge of alternative real estate transaction approaches."

For no particular reason other than little love for MS in general, this seemed a little sinister. An image of a horses head (sans horse) in a bed came to mind.

Elon Musk's brain-computer interface outfit Neuralink tests its tech on a human

Musk. The serial entrepreneur

More likely akin to William Kellogg's elder brother John who had some decidedly peculiar ideas.

Still the Musk empire is resembling Cybus Industries more every day except John Lumic was reasonably sane by comparision. Actually its a toss up whether its Cybus Industries or the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation of a ghastly chimera of both.

Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

Re: Not sure his plans to fix it are realistic

《How do we fix that? Education is the obvious approach, but you can't force people to learn any more than you can ban stupidity.》

Reminded me of Dorothy Parker's offering when challenged to use horticulture in a sentence. ;)

Curious why does "enshittification" have a doubled tt? Does it make it rhyme with "it" rather than "height"? viz enshitification ~ enshytification. In any case both quite clearly faecal coinages.

Japanese government finally bids sayonara to the 3.5" floppy disk

Re: Floppies are Not the Only "Old" Media Still in Use

《....M-O drives to exchange data with some older ultrasound scanners. Looking for new PC adaptors and drives which supported the old media/format ... and sourcing blank media....》

Curious does anyone still make 12" (300mm) MO drives and media?

Many years ago (ca 2012) I had grabbed two MO drives and spare media and added them to my hardware "archive" as new drives weren't being manufactured (by Sony.)

There were hundreds of media recorded with NMR data which I guessed might be required at a later date.

That day arrived. Then I discovered the media was recorded on a SunOS 4 workstation using the native ufs file system with a custom driver to map the 1Kb sector size of the drive to the 512b size required by the SunOS 4 ufs implementation.

I could get hold of a working SunOS box (and my "archive" contained OS install media for most workstation Unixes and hardware) but the custom driver which had apparently shipped on a 3.5" floppy had disappeared into the void leaving only the installation instructions and a quite intimidating licencing agreement (from early 1990s.)

Tried reading the media on a Linux box as the Sun ufs file system was supported but the MO drives sectoring defeated that too. Lession: snaffle the whole working system. Document. Preserve.

Data preservation and archiving is still not formalized in that environment so vast quantities of quite expensively acquired research data are disapearing over the event horizon and in many cases due to now unreadable media.

"..... the answer is blowin' in the wind."

Re: 3.5" floppy discs are not analogue.

《"Digital Transformation" (a phrase which the people using it can rarely define clearly, but seems to mean 'sticking all your data... someone》

Unfortunately that phrase from my first encounter always evoked images more proctological than technological.

The prexisting canine latin phrase "extractum digitorum" might be to blame. :)

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

A glimmer I think...

I wasn't quite clear what this proposal entailed. I suppose I could read ICANN's proposal docs and I could alsk chew off my right arm but I am not certain that the later wouldn't be less painful. ;)

The desire to never register INTERNAL. as a TLD wouldn't require little more than an administrative policy decision I would have thought.

My guess the root servers are hammered with futile queries for ad hoc site local domains which the common DNS software cannot, because they are ad hoc, be constructed or preconfigured by default to *never* forward to the root servers. Settling on a single INTERNAL. site local TLD means BIND and its ilk can treat this TLD specially and never forward queries to the root servers (and hopefully never outside the site.) Any external name server can also reply with an error (nxdomain?) when queried with a .INTERNAL request.

Personally I used BIND's views and TSIGs to run separate name services for the world subset of the full world + internal name service. Include files kept a single instance of each resource record. Never actually required the equivalent of INTERNAL. A the scale involved (~1000 A records with < 50 world and fairly static) this was low maintenance but an order of magnitude larger probably not.

The topology, names etc of the network had zero security concerns - mainly the good hygiene of not wanting rfc1918 addresses pointlessly resolved externally. Admittedly VPNs added a whole new level of misery. :(

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

A Pitch...

I am wondering whether the RSC might give me a grant to study the effects of stimulating and blocking the umami taste receptors on the drinker's perception of the flavour of their tea. The american has done "bitter."

Adding monosodium glutamate (MSG) to the great british cuppa might be a bridge too far.

If tea drinkers were substituting aspartamine sweetener and the result was acceptable one might wonder.

Re: Pointless if potless

《I wonder about the Japanese since they are only on 100 V and drink more tea than the British.》

Perhaps they use a traditional charcoal heat source (chanoyu) but more likely they have more patience (and longer lives*) than those from the Anglosphere.

*helps if most of the population don't own firearms and aren't trying to kill you.

Who on Earth thought it was a good idea to ask an American how to make tea??

I don't imagine anyone actually needed to ask.

Of course these insurrectionists have been adding salt to tea since Boston 1773 - ok, more a case of adding tea to salt.

Personally once you get to 3. (adding milk) you lose me* as you could probably get the same result using blacking lead instead of tea (was once a common adulterant.) :) - I suspect Wm Cobbett was right about tea drinking by the polloi.

*My poison: Formosan Oolong.

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

Re: Needless!!

《Yes, another example of Chesterton's Fence.》

Or in Terry Pratchett's canine latin of Discworld

"Si non confectus, non reficiat" - family motto of the Vetinari.

《standardized perfection》

Any useful standard ought to be prefaced with the Patrician's motto.

When you think about the essential (and insane) concept of perfection anything, process or system etc once it obtains perfection must necessarily be unique to the particular instance which I would think is the antithesis of standard(ized.)

Standardization is formalizing the art of the possible not aspiration to perfection. Engineering v Theology. :)

Antoine St Exupery probably had the most sensible approach to perfection:

"Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher." -Terre des Hommes, 1939.

Here, in the extreme, perfection would be the complete absence of anything - the (philosophical) void (sans vacuum fluctuations.) He was more practically claiming a minimalist approach to design would be more likely to lead in the direction of perfection.

The Land Before Linux: Let's talk about the Unix desktops

Linux ... developers have learned their Unix history lessons.

《Linux distributors and developers have learned their Unix history lessons.》

Not so much now with the passage of time but I wouldn't underestimate the contribution of Unix developers to the initial success of Linux.

I certainly recall very early Linux days when a Unix type wss using our teaching labs SunOS 4 workstations to cross build code for Linux. He was working on gettting g++ working to port his Unix C++ applications.

BOFH: Looks like you're writing an email. Fancy telling your colleague to #$%^ off?

Re: "coloured pencil office"

《Younger developer teams like to use crayons to map processes and "brainstorm" while eating organic avocado sourdough gluten-free toasts and sipping gourmet pink chocolate mocha with raspberry ripple and a gold leaf topping.》

Sounds like a '60s acid (LSD) trip featuring tie died cheese cloth/batik clad hippies workshopping Satre or somesuch.

As Marvin would put it "ghastly."

My pity is reserved for the unfortunate baker who has to produce a sourdough loaf without a gluten containing grain flour.

Re: Not sure here

<sigh> I was expecting a defenestration event. Hasn't been one in quite sometime.

(BOFH) Boss, in line with long standing company policy, my door... ah... window is always open...

Re: Excellent!

"cleaning alcohol*"

I understand spectra(-photometric) grade ethanol is top notch. :) [95% 190 proof (US)]

No el Reg unit of alcohol content or (lack of) sobriety? milliRatfaces? deciPeers?

*I understood this to be isopropyl alcohol - even koumiss would be a preferable tipple.

Re: Another one bites the dust

《Its been theirs since 1937.》

So its going to take more than a winged keel and a decent shifter take the Cobblers Cup from them then?

Btw '37 that would be around the time IBM is reputed to have been doing (dodgy) business with a certain central european totalitarian regime?

Re: Another one bites the dust

"A good opportunity for the oldies among us to dig up some reports we wrote a long time ago, search and replace 'fuzzy logic' "

Wasn't too long ago I dumped a text by Lofti Zadeh on Fuzzy Sets, Logic and Systems from the '70 I think.

Fuzzy Logic is/was used LG washing machines I believe so had some practical uses which AI, ignoring Douglas Adams' loquacious elevators and Red Dwarf's Talkie Toaster, hasn't.

Another Zadeh title "Fuzzy Logic and the Uncertainty of Management" might be up the BOFH's alley (but I might have got the last two words of the title back to front :)

Expert Systems seemed to have faded from fad to the decision trees they appear to have been from the outset. Prolog was pretty big then too - probably most expert systems were written or prototyped in Prolog (Turbo Prolog shipped with a simple geographic example I recall. Digitalk Smalltalk/V had a Prolog interpreter implement in Smalltalk/v with a similar prolog example I vaguely recall.)

The more things change....

Wait, security courses aren't a requirement to graduate with a computer science degree?

Slightly different slant

One obvious difference between civil (&mechanical) engineers and software developers is that the engineers start with a fairly detailed specification with measurable compliance. My observation of developers at work is that they rarely have that luxury. Formal testable specifications are as rare as...*

If you think of something as simple as a buffer overflow - if your specification included a bounds check and what happened when the check failed and could be statically or dynamically verified you could largely eliminate that source of failure.

*hen's teeth, rockinghorse shit etc

Users now keep cellphones for 40+ months and it's hurting the secondhand market

OAP phones looking good

A couple of companies at least in AU market simple, comparatively inexpensive large button phones intended for the visually impaired. "Pensioner", "Seniors" etc phones. Pretty much make(receive) voice calls and send(receive) texts only (likely no camera.) No Android so probably pretty secure too.

Re: Deep Pockets

《The days of miniaturization are gone and every phone must be bigger than the last.》

Reminds me of the Corner Gas (Cell phone episode) but in reverse but the ending is still a propos.

With the end of the 3G service in AU all my nice smaller phones will be ewaste. A Huawei and a Nokia Asha 300 in particular. Really odd, years ago I bought two small ZTE non android phones (with keypad) for AUD7.00 each and only much later discovered they supported 4G/LTE. (Don't ask why I purchased $7 phones. :)

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

First time I have heard of the CUA for decades

The CUA guide was included in documentation shipped with the Window 2 SDK. Probably the most useful part of the whole box load. I think it was actually an IBM publication. I kept that guide for years after discarding the rest. Windows 2 was pretty dismal and even with the Whitewater Group's Actor language and development environment Windows 2 was just too restrictive and difficult to develop anything useful.

Poor communication led to complete lack of communication

As above, so below

"marketing consultant and tech guy"

The fateful combination of two providers for CRM and Web services seems a Hermetic mirror of Toby's two roles.

Now OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants billions for AI chip fabs

It would be ironic...

if after investing gazillions in these fabs that it turns out that it is easier, cheaper and environmentally more friendly to genetically engineer organisms to perform the same operations. At least we know this approach would ultimately lead to something more or less resembling intelligence. Not a strong claim though.:)

How artists can poison their pics with deadly Nightshade to deter AI scrapers

Nightshade - poetic

Atropa belladonna - Atropa < Atropos the fatal greek lady with the scissors and belladonna - beautiful woman.

Gorgeous. A beautiful woman waiting with a pair of scissors - why does that remind of a scene featuring Renée Soutendijk in the Dutch movie "The Fourth Man"* ? :)

If this technique can emasculate AI/LLM's pillaging of the products of human creativity I am all for it.

* If you have seen the movie ("De vierde man") you will know the scene I mean. :)

What makes a hard error hard? Microsoft vet tells all

Ghastly...

Bringing deeply suppressed memories of Win 2.0 and Win 3.0 programming.

Four Yorkshiremen aside if you were to tell coders today of the details of programming Win2-3 they would be insane to believe you. Real mode and 286 protected mode were truly horrid. Win3/386 might have been better but I was in therapy by then.

At least with Unix virtual memory things stayed where they were put in a process' flat memory.

Zuckerberg wants to build artificial general intelligence with 350K Nvidia H100 GPUs

Zardoz?

If in the unlikely event Zuckerberg and co. were to succeed in their rather moist dream of AGI, what sort of world will they have created?

I am reminded of a scene from the film "Zardoz" where one of the immortals was explaining to Sean Connery that they had journeyed to the stars and returned and this in the end, along with all their other achiements, meant nothing to them.

The reason was that immortals had lost their fundamental humanity which I suggest is equally likely in a world totally infected with AGI.

(I saw the movie a very long time ago and mostly remember a stunning Charlotte Rampling playing opposite 007 :)

HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

Retarded, or What?

"Every time a customer buys a printer, it's an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn't print enough or doesn't use our supplies, it's a bad investment."

This pretty much reverses the customer-supplier roles but certainly attempts to redefine the meaning of the word "buys" to something like "to rent" or "to license."

If I were to purchase a 1000 of his printers and sent them directly to landfill or component recyclers, precious metal recovery etc he is saying HP is making a loss. Poor didums. Don't blame the unfortunate HP printer purchaser for your crap business model.

I would laugh if some enterprising soul in a less developed part of the world started producing "libre" printers from parts obtained by deconstructing new or relatively new HP printers. Someone noted previously that in Brazil they had cobbled large external ink tanks on to printers.

"Just say no" to quote Nancy Reagan's slogan for her war on drugs. The analogy between HP ink subscriptions and narcotics addiction isn't too farfetched.

University chops students' Microsoft 365 storage to 20GB

Not heard of hierarchical data storage?

Was a thing even in the 1990s if not a lot earlier.

Basically LRU files migrated to ever slower, cheaper storage until a friendly tape robot (Marvin?) placed the tape containing your unloved files and its fellow travellers in a storage facility. Of course retrieval times were going to be glacial. :)

I certainly advocate data management awareness and policies in academia as I know from bitter experience the sheer quantity of crud (old core files, compiler object files (.o) and binaries for long gone architectures, plus the usual downloaded movie files etc etc) found in user's home directories and project areas. Still very difficult to get across the difference between backup and archive.

Some data such as observational data can be irreproducible and should be stored forever even though it might not have been accessed for decades. There are enough stories about researchers having trouble reading 1/2 inch open reel tapes* to recover decades old data for reprocessing in the light of newer techniques and theories to validate this assertion.

Experimental data while hopefully reproducible might well have originally been from extremely costly experiments to perform and remain so. In this case the data has a dollar value which would certainly exceed the archival costs.

Data generated from computer models while eminently reproducible might take weeks or months but that would decrease as technology advances. Still CPU-Core-hours costs in energy, cost of hardware etc (TCO) which ultimately can be rendered in dollars and assessed against storage costs.

Not that any of this has anything to do with Microsoft's penny pinching shenanigans. Seems to me that these monstrous US tech companies are really trying to kneecap tertiary education and research in their own nation. Not something the PRC for all its myriad faults is foolish enough to permit there.

* And a variety of defunct media types (zip drives, magnetoptical drives, 8" floppies, tape technologies and formats etc) which are largely a lost cause. Even reading a scsi-3 disk with from an old linux host with ext2 file systems can be near impossible. "You can't get the wood you know." (Henry Crun)

Office gossips beware – chitchat could choke your career chances

Re: And in Mission Control

"BOFH's ambitions never included a promotion..."

Extortion including blackmail is likely more lucretive and tax free.

Those in BOFH's line of work often get a nod or wink before the balloon goes up on some new organisational misadventure.

I suppose someone has to now where the switch is to turn the lights back on. :)

Of the couple leaving the building together the old diagnostic circuit kicks in: "They are married." Yes, but to each other? Never assume anything but really who gives a rat's.

Microsoft 365's add-on avalanche is putting the squeeze on customers

Master of the House

This "extra 2% for looking in the mirror twice" reminded me of the "Master of the House" song from Les Miserables. :)

Stripe commuters swap traffic jams for hydrofoil glam

Re: 'Smooth and chop free'

"Well, not exactly. When a hydrofoil travels through choppy water, the waves hitting the struts connecting the hull to the hydrofoils transmit the impact to the craft. One of the bumpiest channel crossings I remember was in a hydrofoil. It was fast though, but not smooth."

Travelling on Sydney Harbour (AU) to Manly from Circular Quay (and back) on a hydroil as a child I recall it was about the roughest (bumpy) passage as any. The Jetcats that replaced the hydrofoils weren't exactly smooth but probably not as bad. The conventional Freshwater class ferries are?/were the comfortable, even elegant way to make the journey. You could enjoy a beer from the bar and watch the sun set on the homeward commute. I can also vouch that these old ladies were no slouches on the open sea having travelled from Sydney to Port Kembla on one.

Tech billionaires ask Californians to give new utopian city their blessing

An unmentionability of billionaires and affordable housing...

I am sceptic not a septic and definitely not that gullible. To believe any of that unmentionable crew would do anything for the common weal I would have to be in La-la land which I suppose if I were in California I would be.

Not buying any of that shit - literally and figuratively.