Posts by Bebu

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

Curious 6000kva?

"installing a 6000kva uninterruptible power supply (UPS) in one of the server racks he serviced."

Wondering whether that is 6kVA rather than 6000kVA?

A serious ask of 4U box weighing 65kg I would have thought?

Wing, Alphabet's drone delivery unit, designs bigger bird to deliver pasta, faster

2.26 kg might still be too low for Australlia

Six 375ml bottles of chilled beer (six pack - stubbies) is apparently ~ (beer 375g + glass 190g) × 6 = 3.4kg*

Cans might fly at ~ (beer 375g + can 16g) = 2.35kg*

Imported brews might be packaged in cans or bottles 330ml, 355ml or 475ml.

I could see local bottleshops (~ off licence?) running a fleet of these to thirsty customers although keeping the beer cold could be challenge as might aerial piracy.

Cask wine (boxed wine) an Australian invention and favourite of serious drinkers comes in various sizes but the 2.0L bag might fly.

*Calculation performed on the back of a beer mat (coaster) so no accuracy or precision should be assumed.

Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

Precious

《"Der boffinß"

Why did I parse this as sounding like Gollum?》

Something about (being) "precious?"

Replacing the s ligature I would assume "boffinss" would be plural in DE (now I see... Bagginsss;)

and gramatically would be "Die Boffinß" precious.

IBM overhauls rewards program for staff inventions, wipes away cash points

Frequent Flyer points :)

Its a bit like airline loyalty points, or similar retail programs (eg "Flybuys" in this part of the world) which after the demise of Ansett Airlines years ago her indoors calls them all "Fly by Night" points. If you even inadvertently collect this nonsense cash out at the earliest opportunity.

If you have a really good idea while at IBM keep it to yourself and tell your worst non IBM enemy the details when you next meet at a conference or convention etc. If he or she uses the idea then either IBM's legals will devour them (revenge) or your enemy will make oodles of money (and won't be your enemy) and screw IBM on licencing fees.

This miserable penny pinching that all these megacorps engage in will destroy them one day.

UK public sector could save £20B by swerving mega-projects and more, claims chief auditor

Re: Erm

《Tax avoidance is legal, yes. However, very often it's achieved through exploiting loopholes in the system. Tax revenue can be increased by closing those loopholes.》

Australia has the gem that is the "General Anti-avoidance Rules" in her taxation legislation which prohibits any arrangement whose sole or overarching purpose is to avoid (minimize.?) tax.

I don't know about other jurisdictions but I assume others have something similar. I was rather amused by this approach when I first heard of it.

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

Nernst equation?

"I wish I listened to our Chemistry teacher when she covered the Nernst equation.

"What did she say?

"I don't know I wasn't listening.

(Apologies to Douglas Adams and Arthur Dent.)

Apparently it tells you that as a general principle electrochemical cells don't works so well when are colder among other things but then I didn't listen.

If I were ever foolish enough to live in these arctic climes I would seriously consider installing a decent diesel generator in the EV's boot. :)

Working from home never looked better: Leopard stalks around Infosys and TCS campuses

Re: any fashion house

A sharkproof suit apparently is a thing Neptunic Sharkproof Suit?

If it works against a decent sized shark's dentition (which I doubt) it should protect against the unwanted attention of Tiddles the leopard - not as though a leopard is 900kg tiger.

I suspect a tiger, shark or crocodile could chew the wearer to a pate consistency inside the suit.

An Alibaba listed knock off appears to have omitted the 'N' from red branding. :)

Cloudflare defends firing of staffer for reasons HR could not explain

Digging a deeper pit.

The CEOs response in summary is

1. "We fucked up" (and we were caught out.)

2. "We entirely reserve the right to fuck up people in these ways to achieve whatever we believe are our organisational goals"

There appears to have been a complete abrogation of organisation's own processes for managing performance and the processes form terminating employment.

If this is what they do to their colleagues who would wish to be a client?

In any civilized part of the world such a lack of procedural fairness would attract some sort of eqitable remedy but of course we speak of the US the home of the "double down" and a stranger to the concepts "civilized", "fairness", "equity" and "remedy."

Re: Employee rights? What are those?

Something decent modern nations recognise in legislation and ILO treaty obligations.

Georgia - that is somewhere on the Black Sea? Right?

Re: Cold, calculated and heartless

《Dom described the dismissal as a “collective calibration for Cloudflare.” 》

"Just wait until AI starts doing the work."

I was already wondering whether Dom and Rosie were progeny of Max Headroom wired to HR's hallucinating AI/ChatGPT system.

“Collective calibration for Cloudflare” is just the sort of shite ChatGPT produces.

Google AI chatbot more empathetic than real doctors in tests

Makes sense

"When I rule the world, medical school will only be open to people who have spent five years working as nurses."

If medicos were recruited from the same cohort as nurses and followed the same career trajectory with respect to status and pay you would probably get the same effect.

It seemed insane to me when in this part of the world we moved from an undergraduate entry medical degree to a postgraduate entry degree (a la US) and restricting entry (in both cases) less than the top 5% of academic performers.

Think recruiting Dr Finlay's Casebook* from Big Bang Theory.

The completely predictable outcome is that most medical students (and graduates) want to be specialists to enhance their status or prestige and have as little to do with patients as possible. Pathologist the extreme case I suppose. :)

*If you are in the US yours is a lost cause.

Remember when enterprise administration was more than just a browser dashboard?

The ris[ck] of cyber-conversion :)

A slippery slope as sir Humphrey might observe, replacing irreplacable parts with RPi SBCs emulating the missing bits.

One day the 29000 will be all Pi or V.

I suppose as long as its running its "living" history in some sense and enthusiasts can actually program it. One might port the Rust compiler :)

A memorial to British computer industry that now rests with steam locomotives and Brunnel's ship "The Great Britain."

Arca Noae is modernizing OS/2 Warp for 21st century PCs

"What it does take to kill off an old OS?"

Probably the wrong question.

A necessary condition: no one left with any practical use or need for it but clearly not a sufficient condition.

In the case of OS/2 there are enough really expensive and now abandoned but largely irreplaceable scientific instruments that were managed by OS/2 warp to keep the OS on life support. I had an ancient magazine (APC) CDRom with OS/2 warp 4(?) which some poor soul in the early noughties used to reinstall OS/2 on a replacement PC for some microscopy instrument. You can still get industrial control ISA motherboards (cost$$) but back then there were plenty of retired PCs available.

The right question is probably "What does it take to keep an old OS alive?"

A sufficient condition: one or more people who care, for whatever reason, to keep it running.

As an example if I really wanted to run Multics on real hardware I would have to build a GE645 workalike but there are the people who cared to write an emulator and others who have build the open sourced Multics system for this emulator.

If you have read Organick's "The Multics System" and perused the Multics PL/1 source code you can appreciate these people are seriously ah... serious - definitely not for the fainthearted.

Not even poor Notepad is safe from Microsoft's AI obsession

We are quite happy...

To my knowledge we don't have any intelligence in the building and I am quite sure we wouldn't want any artificial intelligence upsetting that rather happy arrangement. I don't think it would be very humane to expose any intelligence artificial or otherwise to the unplumbed depths of the intellectual abyss that characterizes this organisation.

I can imagine the notepad nightmare if you tried to save your edited file over the original or exit without saving.

Fortunately these days I only do windows with Windex.

Re: Microsoft?

"And a knowledgeable Windows developer will know that '/' is an acceptable path separator to API calls."

MSDOS (at least v3.x) system calls (int 0x21) also grokked '/' and had a syscall int 0x21h, ah=0x37, al=1, dl='-' to set the switch character (and other things like \dev\ semantics.:)

Not every MSDOS or MS app honoured the altered switch char (probably most didn't.)

I recall back then writing enough of posix/unix compatibility layer for DOS 3.2 to get Unix open source apps to build and run. Removing the translation from '/' to '\\' was mostly unneeded and confusing. Joining all the "drives" to directories under C: (with a "mount" wrapper) meant you could forget about drive letters and multiple working directories. The main show stopper I recall was often the 64kb segmentation and the required far pointer stuffing about. While a hobby for me a friend actually used some the library to port a usenet news reader to DOS although I imagine the networking part would have been a real trial.

Musk claims that venting liquid oxygen caused Starship explosion

Re: Enough with the Elon Musk Snark

《Enough with the Elon Musk Snark. It's tedious and unprofessional.》

"The Register [vulture*] Biting the hand that feeds IT."

Pretty clear I would have thought (on both sides of the Pond.)

*...large birds ... the beak and claws less powerful than in most birds of prey, and which feed largely or wholly upon carrion+. [American Heritage]

+rotting flesh (much easier to chew.)

Not rocket science...

In the absence of cargo (payload), even in the days of sailing ships, the idea of ballast was well understood.

I would be more than happy to supply his rocketeers sandbag ballast in 100g quanta at only a slightly exhorbitant unit cost.

As for snarkiness, if I were to have an idle Boojum on the payroll, Musk could pride himself on being amongst the top 20 on its assigned visiting list.

I suspect Musk intact wouldn't fit into the unused cargo space but I suppose his Saudi creditor could arrange to rectify that objection much to everyone's satisfaction.

Google to lay Asia-Pacific to South America undersea cable

"Internet-starved Antarctica."

All those penguins not getting their Linux feed?

Even during the Antarctic summer the total human head count on the continent wouldn't win a decent melee with a group of determined sealions.

I would assume any real demand for bandwidth must be for scientific purposes rather than streaming services, youtube and social media (there have been enough "problems" down there without the usual top-of-the-list sources of internet titillation.) Internet shopping with free worldwide delivery might be interesting. :)

I don't know if cable/fiber is already run between some of the various bases on the continent itself but bringing an undersea cable to land and having it survive the seasonal and moving ice might be an engineering achievement in itself.

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

CP/M on VAX ? interesting...

CP/M was pretty portable CP/M-86, CP/M-68k,CP/M-8000 but booting a VAX into a hypothetical native CP/M-VAX as there wasn't even a CP/M-11 is Munchausen worthy. ;)

I would imagine the writer meant there was a VAX/VMS hosted PL/M-80 cross-development toolchain.VAXes running VMS or Ultrix (or even BSD) were "commonish" back then before the more affordable Sun kit became de rigeur although VAX cluster were used by Sun itself for its financials until quite late I believe.

Sinclair gear wasn't all that common in AU and the Amstrad models CPC464,664,6128 were a bit more common or visible. Having never seen one in real life, I always thought the Spectrum was M68K based (68008?)

The CPC6128 came with both CP/M-2.2 and CP/M-3 (plus) - the latter had a relocatable 8080 assembler and bank switching. For my sins I could probably even now translate the Z80 ED and FD prefixed instructions in my head.;)

《Insert: "The Four Yorkshiremen sketch" here》

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

Re: Errors that *should* never occur

《My go-to is a boring "unexpected error, contact an administrator" on user-facing systems》

Having been one of those "administrators" I would implore any code monkey to prepend some clue as to where in his or her code the error occurred.

If its open source its still a lottery trying to determine what caused the error and with closed source the vendor (if you can get past the local "distributor") will say something like "without more information there is not much we can do." So the "If you are here, you are fucked" is probably quite accurate. I might use "Lasciate ogne speranza" just to infuriate the antielitist wokery.

Gcc, and most C compilers I imagine, provide macros for the current file, line number and function name so a fairly useful error message is possible.

Otherwise the poor sysadmin has to script the application to run under a debugger and try for a stack trace and exit error code - just knowing the cause was a SIGSEGV cf SIGILL is a win. SIGXCPU once pointed to some coding idiocy.

"Developers" don't really endear themselves to sysadmins. I would have thought the BOFH's defenestration victims should be pretty safe by now as the pile of dead developers would have reached the sixth floor.

How is it that users never believe that the intended "administrator" is the one in the big office with the nice young secretary in the outer office?

That is now.

《The 90s were altogether a far less hysterical time…》

And all the Karens were in Burma?

Infosys co-founder doubles down on call for 70-hour work weeks

Here's an idea...

Why not get the people who the menial shitty work to work for nothing and give them the status of property.

The people who do slightly less shitty work aren't quite property are still severely restricted on what work they can do and with whom they may interact.

As you go up this dismal scale of decreasing shittyness slighly fewer restrictions and very slighly more compensation.

While palookas* at the top are free to what they will with the rest below them.

Ah, silly me - that is the crap they have/had which, if it had been consistently applied, would have spared us from this nutjob's Muskish ravings.

*Not an (Anglo-)Indian word

Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get faulty Windows 10 update installed

poor didums

Disk partitioning was one of joys (not) of yore.

If you were lucky you got partition start and length in sectors (512 bytes.) Otherwise you had to fiddle with cylinders, tracks and sectors - usually pointlessly as the (scsi) disk was lba but you took the total sectors and used 'factor' to come up with a plausible total cylinders, tracks/cylinder and sectors/track. You had to ensure your partition started on a cylinder boundary (and was divisible by 4) and check for overlapping and/or active partitions. Enlarging or reducing a file system was simple if tedious - backup and restore :)

By comparison HPUX 10 lvm and vxfs was a dream (DEC OSF advfs and lvm/lsm not so much.)

Character building...

BOFH: Nice air conditioning system. Would be a shame if anything happened to it

Re: BOFH is now a bloody documetary

An idea for an sequel to ITV's recent effort.

Travaglia doesn't have to dream up any of this dystopian nonsense he just has to chronicle managements' current world best practice.

Subscriptions aren't new - tithes were a sort of "get you into heaven subscription" if you think about it. I don't think anyone minds paying a recurrent fee for some service that they want and can use. Its paying for something they don't want and couldn't use even if they did.

I would like to see something like the (intent of) "right to repair" legislation that mandates that any product that comes with a recurrent cost must be made available for outright purchase in the maximal functional form (no artificial restrictions or disablement) that can rationally used without requiring a subscription and at the same or lower purchase price.

eg You could purchase outright a HP printer (heaven forbid) with the certainty that refilled or third party toner/ink cartridges will work if technically at all possible. I'll put a pair of ice skates in the coffin for that day.

So the PFY's name is...

I concluded a while ago that the BOFH was (figuratively) christened 'Simon' although the upside down cross and slaughtered goat suggests it wasn't C. of E. (Episcopalian.) I imagine Aleister Crowley was a god parent. ;)

It would appear from today's text* the PFY's given name is 'Stephen' hopefully not destined to 'Slouch[es] towards Jerusalem.'

*[Boss] "Which parts of the Company?"

[BOFH] "You mean apart from Stephen and me?"

Not Brain Surgery

《It was a lightbulb that would go dark when there was no juice, then light up brightly when the juice was back on (thanks Pierre Dac).》

And even invert the signal with a LDR/photodiode phototransister, battery and piezo alarm.

Detecting mains (and loss of) with low voltage non contact tech isn't rocket surgery.

Shortest distance between two points is an engineer. :) Not some IT megatech marketing droid.

NASA, Lockheed Martin reveal subtly supersonic X-59 plane

A blast from the past..

《The SPV (admittedly a land vehicle not available until 2068) used a video screen for the backward-facing driver.》

The backward facing driver made me think of Joe 90 or Captain Scarlett (having more or less real actors, not UFO as it might have been a bit dangerous. :) I hadn't watched the puppets since I was a child but its surprising what sticks after 50 years.

Giving the Duck a Go I came up with Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle hence the SPV and the delivery date 2068 which I thought was a bit too realistic for US DOD or UK MOD. Cybertruck III?

Re: Semitic Plane

《Codename "Cyrano"》

How about the Durante? Or the schnozzola which is apparently Italianisation of a Yiddish word so full circle. A rather decent chap I understand.

Must look up why these aircraft have such long pointed noses - even the Concorde (and Concordski) had pretty outstanding peckers. On the ground the Concorde looked more detumescent which is another anatomical reference altogether with no shortage of potential codenames from the tech billionaires .

I thought on serious reason the SST program was scrapped was the real likelihood of buggering up the ozone layer. Isn't this a concern now? - given we will have parboiled ourselves through climate change long before we get toasted or sauté with UV I suppose not a big worry.

I was wondering whether there was some connection between the interest in hypersonic craft and the revival of SST civil aviation. Cannot see any connection myself.

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

Off on a Tangent....

I was wondering about the source of the image for this article - I was thinking one of the statues of the Monks from the "Lie of the Land" - rather appropriate I thought. Alas no, cranking over the evil machinery of the internet I find its a cropped image of a sculpture outside of a library of Belfast's Queens University.

Your pacemaker should be running open source software

A heart transplant might be safer...

When I was reading this story SNMP jumped into my mind ... I think the dark side is calling ... just install an SNMP agent on the device and publish the device's MIB what could go wrong?

History would say heaps.

At 70k lines of code that is a lot more than I would have imagined but I am pretty sure that the one bug per 100 lines is pessimistic but without a verifiable (formal) specification that defines the behaviour of the device who is to say what is a bug.

In the pacemaker case I would assume the cardiac stimulus would be provided an autonymous hardware signal generator and timing component and that the processor's software only monitors, logs and fine tunes the autonymous hardware.

If your pacemaker's software borks you still have limp mode. Pretty much what the heart itself does. :)

I assumed that medical devices used software like AdaCore's SPARK Ada to develop the soft-/firm-ware and the idea of coding in assembler or C is frightening.

The article's main or at least addressable gripe was data access for clinical purposes. This could be remediated by layered standards and once you get to the application layer its just the format of the records that requires specification and definitely wouldn't require ASN.1.

Vehicle control computers suffered from the same nonsense but I believe was becoming less of a problem... pre Tesla/EV anyway.

To think Musk wants to put an IMD (neuralink) in your brain. You wouldn't need Tesla FSD to T-bone another vehicle your implant will save it the trouble.

Re: Certifications for Medical Devices

《metric craptonne (it's 10% bigger than an Imperial crapton)》

I take it that is a short imperial ton? Or is merde 10% denser than anglosphere shite?

Why is one still calling avoirdupois etc "Imperial?" I thought the UK went metric yonks ago, not only is the Empire long gone, the former possessions are repaying the "debt" by providing comparably competent rulers in Westminster today. :))

The only nation that avoirdupois etc now has any legal currency must be the US? Probably time to call these units US ton or 'Murcan ton. Only readers of old manuals and old cookbooks need to know these old units - the difference between US and Imperial pints for example and even then treading carefully.

While we fire the boss, can you lock him out of the network?

Re: Hot backup servers?

"they needed a hot backup site, and when they balked at the cost"

That bit rings true. I suspect a case of the "pot calling the kettle..."

I suspect many here have seen things while not quite "Universes where the laws of physics were devised by a madman*", have come very close.

If I were Alvin I would have advised the organisation to have asked the engineer what he actually wanted in toto (everything) and then given it him and then advised these lords and masters to resign en masse. (He who covets the crown often isn't so keen when he discovers it comes with a kingdom.) Not a mess I would want to have ever been identified with.

This sort of nonsense and worse is still tragically prevalent and without legislative sanctions that place criminal responsibility at door of the C-suite nothing will change.

*The Rings of Akhaten

Probably equivalent to the halting problem....

"absolutely certain that you can revoke ALL their access"

If I were the target or could ever be I would fabricate something that could not actually provide access until you revoked accesses. Fortunately I would never give a rat's at the best of times.

Vendors ship such a massive number remote access "opportunities" preinstalled in their product that Alvin's protagonist could just retain a list of the installed hardware and software (even just in his head) and keep an eye on the various security lists and in no time at all: "I'm back! Miss me?"

If nothing else a situation like this is a wakeup call for the organisation to review policies, all facets of security, operations, logging and documentation. Most SMEs are a complete dog's breakfast and that libels canines.

Re: Likewise ...

"The customer is King"

Charles I or Louis XVI peut-être? :)

Elon Musk made 1 in 3 Trust and Safety staff ex-X employees, it emerges

Different strokes... different folks

The constitutional and legislative frameworks of Australia is very different from the US.

We don't have a Bill of Rights and our nearly immutable Constitution generally has very little to say about the individual.

So we don't have "rights" as US citizen might understand but we have both Federal and State legislation addressing a number of distinct concerns that does place limits on what can and cannot be said or published. Our defamation laws are a bit archaic (eg no public figure test, limits on the defense of truth or public interest) so not too difficult to be on the wrong end of libel or slander proceedings.

Try performing a NAZI style salute in central Melbourne and see where you deservedly end up.

I imagine any major platform would need a lot more than a handful of third rate US lawyers to keep the content on their platforms on the right side of Australian legislation.

In the not too distant future I can see X being blocked in AU for infringements, non-compliance and contempt. I don't see X fans (being able to) configuring VPNs to feed their addiction. :) Not that Musk would give a rat's as AU is pretty small beer.

Silicon Valley weirdo's quest to dodge death – yours for $333 a month

X (née Twitter) ?

Shouldn't that be né?

Enough tits on X already without tacking a bit of extraneous biology on to the platform's expiring body.

Genotypically it would be XX but most would be asking XYY?

Still the silly season

"standard mix of broccoli, cauliflower, black lentils"

Lost me there - his "emissions" are probably not doing a lot for global warming. Could add brussel sprouts...

The tree nuts, berries and 100% dark chocolate are nice enough if you can afford them and are chockers with antioxidants.

Still after a week or two would become pretty tedious as would fresh truffles and beluga caviar I could imagine (chance would be a fine thing. :)

Variety is the spice of life and I think it was Brillat-Savarin that remarked that all food was poison and to consume a little of a great variety of dishes (presumably to minimize the dose of any particular toxin or one to counteract another.)

The restricted calorie diet, I think, is supposed to slow the loss of telomere but I don't think it can reverse or arrest the process and I think the evidence for calorie reduction in humans is unclear.

He will be pretty pissed if after 40 years of this torture you can buy pills from the supermarket that do the same thing not that 2064 is likely to be a nice place.

When I read the USD333.00/month my hunch is his purported diet is likely theatre and after hours he enjoys a decent cut of wagyu steak and a chilled imported japanese beer. :) You only need a 1000 subscribers and you are in clover. :) Float it, flog it and POQ.

Re: Must be a fan of Lady Cassandra

She ended up as an A4 size bit of skin stretched over something like an embroidery frame. If I recall correctly the Doctor made a crude allusion to the original location of that skin on her body.

Even The Face of Boe (Capt Jack) eventually shuffled off the mortal.

Adios, dead zones: Starlink relays SMS in space for unmodified phones on Earth

Now you'll never have an excuse for missing that weekend work text or call

Sorry

1) a bear ate my phone...

2) bridge climbing/skydiving - not allowed phones on persion

3) National Guard/ROTC/Territorials/Army Reserve etc training/exerecises no phones permitted

4) Scuba diving phone no workee under water ditto for caving

5) Religious retreat

6) use your imagination

Top LLMs struggle to make accurate legal arguments

Sounds likeTrump's legal team...

《....struggle to make accurate legal arguments [..] can't cite cases, fully grok the law, or reason about it effectively》

Or Musk's diy opinions on the (in)applicability of various laws to his sorry case.

Data wrangler Zuckerberg becomes world's least likely cattle rancher

Least likely rancher...

10,000 lbs of nut per cow per year ~ 4.5t (4500kg)

According to this Queensland* govt publication you can expect "3.5 to 4 tonnes of NIS per ha (12 to 13 kg per tree)" where NIS is nut-in-shell. Extracting said nut (kernel) is a royal pita. Takes around 16 years for full production from a tree.

So you would need well over a hectare (ha) ~ 2.5ac per beast considering cattle likely couldn't profitably eat the unshelled nuts (wild pigs can and thus are a problem for growers.) So probably not the most efficient use agricultural resources.

These tech billionaires are altogether a peculiar lot and I am not sure that the macadamia are the only nuts on this ranch. Martin Clunes once remarked that he had been blessed with a double helping of face where I have always found it odd the owner of facebook appears to have been waiting in the wrong queue.

*The macadamia tree is native to S.E. Queensland (Mt Bauple in particular.)

Broadcom ditches VMware Cloud Service Providers

Just wondering?

I would wonder when in non US jurisdictions whether the communication and timing of the concellation ofthese contracts could be considered unreasonable and subject to equitable remedy.

This is the generic risk inherent in any externally provided service. Imagine AWS deciding to ditch all its bozo (below zero = less profitable) clients with the same timing and paucity of communication.

On-prem and bare metal off-prem as a service might be a tip for 2024.

Cutting-edge microscopy reveals bottled water has 'up to 100 times' more bits of plastic than previously feared

Should have tested beer

Back in Cobbitt's day he recommended (small) beer over tea (an anathema), milk or water.

I wouldn't be surprised if traditional beer making as described in his A Cottage Economy somehow removed (flocculated?) these nano/microplastics from the final product.

An opinionated old bugger but I reckon his England was better for all its faults than the contemporary one but I think G K Chesterton made the same observation a very long time ago.

X's 2024 plans include peer-to-peer payments in app push

About right...

"2023 was foundational for X, and 2024 will be transformational."

He excavated to the foundations of Twitter in 2023 and 2024 should see Twitter completely razed to X in the transformation formerly known as demolition.

One has to wonder if he intends to half inch the payments platform software that I believe India intends to donate to developing nations? Par for the course.

The pong of a money laundering is already wafting from X's direction.

Apple sets new 16,000-foot iPhone drop test after 737 fuselage fail

With or without?

《Terminal Velocity is Terminal Velocity. If the case/phone makers test at that speed, no additional height will make a blind bit of difference》

With or without phone's owner's death grasp?

With I believe around 66m/s (148mph.)

The owner landing first might cushion the phone's impact.

Seriously a thin rectangular object would likely tumble which I guess would limit its maximum velocity.

Open source's new mission: To boldly go where no software has gone before

Re: Only for a specific type of open source, and only from a certain viewpoint

《Ooh look, a flying pig.》

《Sure, but you might say exactly the same of closed-source software. Setting the bar a wee bit high maybe?》

Closed source more akin to a flying elephant very poorly disguised pretending to be a (super)zeppelin but I imagine, equally, a lucky tracer round having the same tragic results.

Both involve substantial gas bags but if the two only the Graf's engineering can admired.

Need to plug in an EV? BT Group kicks off cabinet update pilot

Another of Baldrick's "Cunning Plans"

The one Blackadder series never made was Boxwallah Blackadder Bets on the Raj.

Pisspoor was the british administrative capital of the Raj then? Their belvedere is now a common term for a pessimistic outcome.

Blocked streets and thick cables strewn about the foot paths - what could go wrong?

Do these cabinets currently even have 7kW supplied to them? 30A at 240V? or is it 240V three phase?

I have the impression that the UK government and much else in the UK couldn't organise a cup of tea in a bordelllo let alone the proverbial. Blackadder and the Prince Regent could do a better job - even Baldrick had more talent the current ministry.

New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster

The real lesson...

Don't (re)write C etc code in assembly. While you are are smarter than the compiler the compiler is a plodder (like Irving:) and usually doesn't make alignment and other foolish mistakes. Get a better compiler or pass the suboptimal assembler code emitted by the existing compiler through your own optimisation stage.

Compilers back then did sfa* optimisation so even adding a peep-hole optimiser was a win.

*classical technical term rendered by Terry Pratchett as adamus con flabello+ dulci [Jingo]

+sir Terry was a gentleman.

NIST: If someone's trying to sell you some secure AI, it's snake oil

Keeping It Everyday

Evasion attack - disguise: fake beard or mask.

Poisoning attack - telling well chosen (or not so) lies to idiots: the whole US political process.

Privacy attack - the shadows you cast: when Soufflé Girl deleted the Doctor from the Dalek mind hive* and when he subsequently erased all other records of his existence he was still defined by the hole his removal left.

Abuse attacks - disfigurement: graffitiing a moustache on a portrait possibly with certain banned symbols or gestures.

The value(?) AI is adding here is making its dismal output more credible to the polloi but as the anti-vax, Ivermectin and general Covid nonsense demonstrated, a frightening proportion of the population will believe just about any codswallop.

*Sorry look it up :)

Xerox prints pink slips for 15% of workforce

"now go replace that human resources cartridge"

I know its the silly season but I parsed the above sub as HR components (personnel) being user replaceable modules :)

A HR AI ChatThingy in a print cartridge sized plug-in component is probably do-able now. :( Only requires a small upgrade to the manglement module. The dead or otherwise defective modules can offloaded in the C-suite :)