Posts by Bebu 2075 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2022
《I had colleagues who would come back with Hershey Kissses whenever they had been across the pond and I was always surprised they got them through customs. Perhaps they declared them as dog food?》
Wrong end of the dog?
See Musk/Twitter autoresponder emoji.
Growing up in the antipodean realm of Cadbury, Hershey bar were what the GIs gave the liberated civilians (mostly pretty young women :) in WW2 movies and later TV series "Combat." As a kid I assumed Hershey bars were the Ambrosia of chocolate. I didn't get to try one for nearly forty years but in the meantime discovered european dark chocolate so the disappointment was even greater - definitely Hershey《chocolate》 These days its Lindt 95% or 99% or nothing. We get it here in the supermarkets at about the same price as the Cadbury or Nestle 《》 offerings. Oddly the Lindt is often manufactured in Canada or the US. I believe Canada has/had a chocolate maker Ganong (same name as my undergrad physiology text) so there must still be some taste buds north of the 49th parallel.
Never new what Root beer was. Featured in US TV shows like Gidget. Didn't know what Germoline was either. So root beer is Preparation H in liquid form. Learnt a lot today. :) Will avoid all three.
As any BOFH will confirm printers are the bane of your existence. Losing responsibility for printing was always in the daily prayers.
In the days of yore network HP printers were the rule because they were pretty reliable and had decent Mac and Windows driver support and generic postscript for everything else (various unix print systems.) Toner pricing was in the limb amputation category but all genuine toner was then. The bigger printers were per page cheaper for toner. The last HP printer I purchased was a 9000s series monster was to replace another 9000 which decided to have a 'wee lie down.' Of course as soon as the new printer was installed opposite the defunct one it returned from the dead and both were working five years later when I left.
Ultimately the whole organisation moved to large leased (Ricoh) printers that is pretty much the HP model with per page charges and maintenance fee, but ten years ago. Worked pretty well as the printers phoned home any problems so were fairly well maintained. (Answer to the prayer. :)
Personally mono lasers - all brothers - cheap, cheap consumables, models with Linux support - none ever died just given away when moving house. Even my current fujixerox docuprint is actually a brother.
The only HP device I still own is a HP 35s RPN calc which still goes - every other desktop, notebook etc etc carked it pretty much just out of warranty. Buying a HP? Only after a Tesla. And then hell might freeze.
MS-Dos was normally such a pita with its switch syntax that I would have thought if defrag didn't detect at least something resembling a FAT file system it would have chickened out.
I have seen a system V/386 file system trashed when the PC was booted off a DOS floppy and said file system "fixed." Sorry fsck isn't now going return your data... all gone to the great archive in the sky.
Fortunately in those days almost all Unix machine ran on proprietary hardware (non intel x86) even if the CPUs (eg M680x0) weren't so this was a one off cockup and very sobering lesson for the (ir)responsible party.
If the basic principle were that if you are making more than mouse money from a software product or service you must comply with these rules or incur the penalties. If you use open source software in any product covered by this directive then the onus is on you (and not the maintainer) to meet the specified timelines etc. So you either in-house everything (and hire more coders etc) or throw some money at the open source projects. A win-win from my perspective.
I suspect that the possibility of non-EU vendors deciding not to continue to supply their products to EU states has crossed the minds of those behind this proposed legislation but I am sure that prospect hasn't resulted in any sleepless nights. ;)
《lack the cluons 》
Sheltered life - I hadn't encountered this part of the standard model :)
I assume a cluon is an intermediate vector boson that holds together the constituents of the clue nucleon presumably composed of charged 1/3e and 2/3e 'clark' particles. Significant intracranial Cluonium aggregates are extremely rare I believe - daft matter not so much.
Dr Kimble - at least qualified to treat the patient :)
Long memories. Anyone up for "David Vincent" from the "The Invaders" ? We really did gobble up vast quantities of inane pap in those days. Not that anything has really changed there.
Although I am surprised that the hospital didn't offer the offender an employment contract on the spot given the enduring shortage of heathcare staff.
Assuming the chap wasn't an outright loony, one (or more) of the 14 patient records should lead to this fellow or the instigators of this transgression.
Hikvision? Anyone still using their cameras? Turfed out in AU - insecure and probably "trojaned" by a large nation state to the north of AU. Had to pull them out of Parliament House and government buildings a few years ago now.
Still have one in the machine room on an isolated net to have a record of which building maintenance contractor stuffed our machines. External contractors with unaudited master key access - brilliant security no?
"There's always a shortage of Linux etc engineers like myself, why should I work in an office when I can do the entire job remotely from home?"
My limited observation suggests acute becoming critical.
Linux/Unix administration is often easier remotely as your diagnostic logs, tools etc aren't normally accessible from the user's workstation or problem server or VM (for reasons of security if no other.)
For the decades I had an office I rarely had to leave the office (usually either for the exercise or to (pretend to) be sociable.
Pretty quickly people learnt that a considered email or succinct phone call would get a prompt solution or explanation much sooner than pestering me in person - quite BOFHy really :) - My last last office was quite difficult to find so only the intelligent could find it (who weren't looking anyway.)
So years before I went WFH (long before covid) I was effectively working remotely.
In the last few months I have seen these roles (mostly RHEL and RHEL/Solaris) initially advertised at the lower/middle pay scales, readvertised at top scales or contractor rates and now as full time consultant roles. No takers possibly because the projects are already train wrecks.
《There are those who can micromanage well remotely.
Like sending a message every 15 minutes:- How are you getting on?- What are you working on now?- Can we have a quick huddle?- Can you walk me through what you did in the last hour? Please share your screen.- Can't see any commits? Can you commit now?- Could you provide a summary of every email you send, just so I'm in the loop?- How often are you checking your work messages at home? We need to stay connected.- Can you log your exact start and finish times for each task? It's for time management analysis.- Are you updating your task status every 30 minutes? It helps me track progress in real-time. I have seen no movement.- I noticed a slight delay in your email response time today. Is everything okay?- Could you share your browser history at the end of the day?- Can we go through your yesterday's browser history?- Could you give me a rundown of the exact thought process behind your last completed task?》
For some reason this reminded me of Gus in Drop the Dead Donkey. Perhaps this fool could be convinced that you live in Muskopolis on Mars and delays are unavoidable (speed of light - file ticket with Einstein or God.)
Otherwise I might suggest that he (pretty much never a she) insert his capital extremity into the caudal gastrointestinal oriface of a deceased ursine while I get one with my task(s.)
From the graph which part of asymptotic don't these csuite manglement clowns don't understand? ... Silly me! Everything of course. Stupid Cs.
Without applying any clever statistical curve fitting I cannot see the percentage moving below 25%.
To me this implies there is a basic structural property in the system limiting the response/stimulus. Something like the number of active sites limiting the reaction rate once the reagent concentration saturates those sites.
Hypothesis: 25% of the IT workforce are sufficiently skilled and clever enough to choose their employment at their convenience with no real risk of underemployment. Of course this implies 75% are unskilled dills - the fish John West rejects. (Damn good advert. from yesteryear.) The 75% in my experience is about right but its more the uninterested and unmotivated rather than those intrinsically lacking intelligence or ability although there are seriously dumb Cs in lower middle manglement with whose laziness one is left wondering how they manage to breathe.
From the noise of the gibberish that most first year law students emitted I vaguely recall (from many decades ago I admit) their talking about the wording of Acts of Parliament (Statutes) have specific technical meanings attached to them. I would guess the semantics would be far more constrained than the vulgar english of the polloi but still extremely context dependent I would think.
Having ChatGPT write or interpret an internet RFC might be good training wheels.
Baldrick surely (with lashings of the prince regent.)
Blackadder was reasonably intelligent but rather unlucky with his misfortunes compounded by the idiots around him.
I don't really think Musk is actually very bright but fairly lucky with his good fortune compounded by the clever people around him,
"or minor explosion"
In which case in the resulting VR, the battery life will be irrelevant but I imagine will extensively feature either harps or pitchforks.
Reminds me of the probable urban myth concerning Mossad and cell phones presumably back in the pre hands-free brick days where their agent obtained their target's phone either modified it or replaced it with one containing a small quantity of cemtex (c4) and a remote detonator. Ring, ring. Hello. Is that you Yasser? Bang!
Not that clever I think. Got caught using faked Australian passports which really pissed off the AU government.
"Hansson is entitled to his opinions, the libraries are also entitled to choose their business partners."
Can't argue with that other than the observation that this "Hansson" chap is a (natural) person while the "libraries" are not.
The latter clearly cannot hold opinions but can have and enforce policies.
If MS disclaims any knowledge and HP too I would be rather worried about this software might be up to.
The "Trojan" horse was actually made by the beseiging Greeks (bronze age victim blaming :)
If this application contained malware its just infected 100s of millions of machines.
Printer drivers always were and still are a PITA. For non windows, non mac platforms mostly a dead loss. I stick to network (non HP) printers as they normally can at least print generic postscript. Brother appears better at Linux support. One of their printers shares the same engine as my FujiXerox so got lucky there.
http://sdf.org/plan9/
I recall a paper delivered by Rob Pike containing a lot of Plan9 details (AUUG Conference 1992, Darling Harbour, Sydney.) It was a real breath of fresh air at the time. Subsequently some of abstractions from Plan9 were adopted by Linux (born '92?), BSDs (386BSD '92 too?) and SysV.4.
In the thirty one years since IT generally hasn't become less crappy.
Since I have just laid my hands on a rpi5 I should try 9front on it - the pi would have a lot more grunt than the original gnots.
Once had a very senior if somewhat unpleasant academic cum administrator who, when kicked further upstairs, decamped on the weekend to his new accommodation with his PC and a length of thin coaxial (10Base2) ethernet with the T-BNC connector thereby disabling the network on the whole floor for the rest of weekend.
The newly constructed building to which he had decamped had the new fangled twisted pair so he wasn't any better off and in any case no one at that point was using DHCP.
Silver lining - not my problem.
《the free speech in the 1st ammendment is definitely right wing, because it was written by old white male cishet slave owners
true free speech is creating a space where the oppressed feel free to talk and allowing everyone to speak equally creates inequality that maintains the statues quo
this means true free speech requires the silencing of some people but this is necessary to keep it truly free and the censored are oppressive hatemongers anyway so it's not discrimination based on a characteristic, it's discrimination based on a hateful choice they made》
This for real? I first read it as a clever, if somewhat sarcastic, satire but our insane times I have a nasty creeping suspicion the poster is in deadly earnest.
I did think the "statues quo" was a clever oblique reference to the removal of the monuments of Confederate (Civil War) figures with an intentional malapropism of 'status quo.'
Redolent of the satire in Orwell (Blair')s "1984" or "Animal Farm."
Discrimination (against) here being synonymous with persecution and not as in discrimination between (good and evil) is still persecution - own it, wear it.
I am guessing he was, in spite of the role titles, at the bottom of the heap - more PFY 2nd class than BOFH. More Gomer Pyle than George Patton. The "school director of technology" was probably the ranking BOFH.
The BOFH would either go for the window option or something even more nuclear.
LaHiff certainly departed in LeHuff.
Not a deep thinker I suspect. I can think of dozens of really nasty sleepers and evil easter eggs that would only wreak havoc long after I had sipped my first Piña Colada on Ipanema Beach. ;)
I just cannot see where the money is in this lark. The real BOFH is always in credit at the local besides still being employed as well as not incarcerated (miraculous considering the number of homicides.)
In the last 20 years security has gone from being an essential component of the system and network administrators' roles to being purely specialized performance theatre.
It doesn't suprise me that the wheels regularly fall off with these security muppets, albeit well credentialled, in charge.
From my viewpoint: you walk in, evaluate the minimum that needs to be done a) immediately b) as soon as possible c) must be done in the very near future etc seq. No dice - walk out. Anything less is culpable complicity.
I doubt the data will be deleted. Its more likely the data just becomes inaccessible to the user that created it - note that I didn't write owner.
I would guess everything can still be accessed by Google's algorithms to join dots and defeat any attempt at privacy or anonymity.
Douglas Adams seems to have arrived at similar conclusion. :)
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
《May I suggest they read the Daily Mail comments (*)? That should make anybody rapidly lose the will to carry on existing.》
Pretty much my thinking. I imagine anyone unfortunate enough to still have vital signs in contemporary England is seriously contemplating changing that.
Reading the authors' background I imagine there is possibly a bit of MRDA.
《"typically refers to joining together layers of wood" So, plywood then?》
My thoughts exactly.
Peddling a large tea chest for your servers. :)
If I recall correctly those tea chests were lined with tinfoil (probably aluminium) which could be a rudimentary Faraday cage.
I think the "Spruce Goose" was also constructed of plywood. Now who does Howard Hughes remind me of today?
The Mosquito too?
"It will be revealed that most, if not all AI apps are really just a telnet session to a terminal in a datacenter where a guy types out his best guess."
I have seen the manglement-speak that ChatGPT churned out when asked to write a justification for the purchase of those Apple VR goggles. Absolute gem of management gibberish that pretty much precludes any telnet guy in the datacentre and manglement types either a) can't type or b) can't type fast enough or c) can't compose a sentence lucid or otherwise - mostly all three.
《Wrong answers only.》
Elon Musk buys "The Church of Scientology" for a reported USD1,300Billion and rebrands to "The Universal and Orthodox Church of 'X'" with a mission to relocate in toto to Mars. All members of the renamed C-of-X will require mandatory Neurolink implants.
Might be the one favour Musk does for this world. :)
《Quantum computing will increase in power, until it all disappears into a Black Hole of its own making.》
I always reckoned once QC became powerful enough it would be (super)sentient and capable of perceiving all the possible worlds and choosing one that is devoid of humanity to disappear into its less dystopian future.
Any similarity to Pratchett and Baxter's "The Long Earth" is not coincidental. :)
Pretty horrifying to contemplate AI/ML running on Quantum Computers with potentially millions of Qubits.
Hopefully I will be ex-Terra (likely sub-Terra) before then.
Universities don't typicallly have the resources/funding of megatechs like Alibaba by a least several orders of magnitude which should retard development. Academic types are more likely to use any QC resources they develop to answer much more interesting questions.
I always assumed "Alibaba" was from the Arabian folktale "Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves" which is probably fair warning. The woodcutter goes on to set up an online business with his forty new associates?
I am pretty sure that amongst "developers" lack of diversity is in no way a problem rather the lack of the "right" diversity is probably an insurmountable problem.
Finding a reasonable, rational or mostly sane developer capable of delivering a cogent, coherent presentation is a major challenge without further restricting the choice to female, male or any of the other letters.
AI + online conferences might see the likes of Maxine Headrooma delivering papers on the AI-Cybernetics interface. :)
What a bloody silly world in which we seem to live?
If I were living in Osaka I would put on a suit and turn up ten days a month for USD168 even, actually especially, if I didn't work for the firm. :)
A bit of a contrast to the likes of Besoz and co. who are probably closely studying the Justinian Code for inspiration on how to "amend" or reverse the 13th Amendment.
《I would like to know 'Who' had the regeneration idea as it is unique and actually works as a way to allow the show to continue as long as the BBC wants to keep going !!!》
I believe the Gallifreyans (probably Rassilon) in the very earliest times pinched the tech from Great Vampires. Given the pretty ghastly forms of those dark times - the Racnoss, Carrionites - one has to wonder what the form was of those original Gallifeyans - the dual brainstem and hearts suggest something not hominiform or even bipedal. ;)
I would guess that Rassilon looking into the distant future decided a human appearance would allow his lot to blend into the background and deflect the blame for some of their more atrocious acts onto humanity.
As for the actual question :) who in the BBC dreamt it up is, sadly lacking regeneration, very likely no longer with us.
The idea of the mind of a dying individual be transferred or imprinted onto another individual isn't new - at least as old as the idea of transmigration of the soul or reincarnation... so ancient. Plenty of stories use some version of this plot device - HP Lovecraft used in a couple of stories. (Lovecraft - another favourite of the wokery.:)
Given the obvious lack of total fidelity in regeneration (actually seems altogether rather dodgy) it seems to be a process of using the control of time to instantly grow a clone of dying individual and transferring most of the memories of the dying to the clone's otherwise blank brain but very little of the deceased's personality. This would seem to me to be a moral and ethical minefield (which only Melody Pond appears to have escaped.:)
Don't need the heavy artillery of ChatGPT to answer that one I don't want to go.
Surely Davros sans the dubious benefits of regeneration might claim the "BBC's longest lived space alien" title. :)
"Season 14 Tom Baker story "The Talons of Weng-Chiang"
A bit ethnically stereotyped for the wokery if they ever dismounted from their high horses and stooped to watch anything that predates their sorry existence. If they were to be inflamed by this classic who then Sexton Blake or Fu Manchu would send them incandesant.
I was at the time tickled pink by the Peking (sic) homunculus fitted with a pigs brain. Little homocidal men with brains sourced from the abattoir - sounds a lot like the contemporary leadership of the planet.
If I recall correctly Leela actually wore a dress for Victorian London - a bit chilly otherwise- a disappointment for the engineering students who only started watching the series with the advent of Leela - they could appreciate her acting talents. :) Later Romana (both actresses) were a bit too "intellectual" for them.
Actually probably not great fare for the feminists either.
If I were NVidia I would think the smartest move would be a complete and contrite mea culpa and try and cut an IP sharing deal that at least in the immediate term seriously advantages the wronged party. Everyone might actually then be a winner - the auto oem customers included (everyone except the lawyers.:)
Never happen - why mitigate when you can litigate?
More likely everything from the brainstem up has liquified into his offensive vomit.
My sympathy is for any smaller enterprise that directly or indirectly relies on any service that uses this nut job's software.
In the real face to face world this level of obnoxious would quickly lead to one face be removed or at least severely remodelled.
Rates at least a 110% defenestrationability score.
..."the bit state of the Cosmos and the anterior projection of digitized sine waves?"
Did Prof Hawking really write that? If I had the faintest idea of what it meant I would probably know.
Hugh Everett's Many Worlds paper was titled "The Theory of the Universal Wave Function" so Cosmic bit states might be a thing.
I hadn't considered the BOFH and PFY as instruments of the dark side of the Force - "the force is strong in that one."
CP/M & DOS had the dread trinary "abort, retry, ignore" none of which were particularly useful. abort = accept your data loss, retry = hope springs eternal, ignore = pretend a great chunk of missing data won't make a difference.
The Martian atmosphere being what it is (or rather what it isn't) the level of GCR are going to be pretty high on the surface.
Being almost all erectile tissue this potential loss of performance might deter him.
I have a vague recollection that the ladies have a fair amount of similar tissue but don't get to wave it about as it is more or less internal, wrapped around their interesting bits. One might deduce that GCR might also be a problem for them - or perhaps just a case of faking it a little bit more. :)
I would be more concerned about the mutagenic effects of GCR on the germ cells. Who would want Martian Musk clones with two heads?
Optimist.
I suspect just in time for the 64 bit equivalent of the y2k fizzer. (At ~300Gyr :)
Instructing civil servants in programming (or generally any of the polloi) is pretty futile. Those that have chosen programming as a vocation and trained as "developers" are usually, on the whole, pretty piss poor.
I cannot imagine sir Humpty or Bernard ingesting the intricasies of C++ templating with gusto even with the benefit of a classical education.
《Young 'uns would n't know the difference between deviationism and dialectic if it bit them on their socialist realist arse.》
Mostly a consequence of an inability to bimanually locate said anatomical feature, one suspects.
I had forgotten how bonkers the other side of the Iron and Bamboo curtains were before Perestroika & Glasnost (that worked out well did it not?) and actually is still pretty bonkers in those parts.
I recall in those days the lefties on campus were prattling about dialectic materialism which I guessed was that soviet state religion but I have no idea what it was or whether those lefties were for it or against it. They generally made about as much sense to me as my quantum mechanics studies. Not much changed there.
Not that the "West" or non-aligned (third world) nations could then have been considered paradigms of sanity.
Today, if you were to construct a list of the world's noted loonies, you would have more than half of what laughingly passes for this planet's leadership and of the Hotel Registrations in Davos during the WEF bunfights..
Do not go gentle into that good night./ Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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