Posts by Bebu 2075 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2022
As I am rather selective about my friends and have managed so far to avoid "jumpers" but those who aren't averse to lending a "wee shove" not so much. :)
From my limited exposure to VMware I think it is a bit rich Broadcomm's calling AT&T's estate a dog's breakfast - really a case of the pot calling the kettle black.*
* apparently originally Spanish appearing in Cervantes "Dijo el sartén a la caldera, Quítate allá ojinegra"
Manglement anywhere aren't exactly noted for their technical excellence, or even competence - technical or otherwise.
Suggesting to google management that enforcing the use of RAII might only elicit uniform vacant looks with perhaps the unlikely but definitely odd genius wondering how using a papyrus boat might help.
"Boy am i glad i.get my first retirement benefits this month. The industry has lost whatever feeble little mind it used to have."
Got my first last week. Alas more beer than champagne but never again having to deal with this shit is worth giving up the grape for the hop.
Have to wonder what the BoFH makes of this nonsense? He couldn't eject the entirety of Apple manglement from his conveniently open window ..... could he?
I also wonder whether one could write a javascript app (served from a conforming site) that would run within Safari, Chrome etc and talk https with non-conforming sites with long life certs and render those pages in Safari's DOM - a browser within a browser?
From memory I suspect automating the frequent replacement of certificates in Dell iDRACs would be a seriously non-trivial exercise. As I think the certs are stored in non-volatile memory (flash?) 45 day rotations would mean that memory would be molested every 30-40 days (9-12 times per year) which might be pushing it for some memory technologies.
Bad enough installing ancient versions (32bit) of Firefox just to talk to web servers embedded in equally old hardware and also need ancient versions of Java for Java web start. Ghastly. It all is. Absolutely Ghastly.
the senseless toil of the daily grind. I don't recall the good doctor ever engaging in anything resembling toil, senseless or otherwise.
All our big tech firms appear to see their ultimate destination as being clones of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation. "Sounds ghastly. It all is. Absolutely ghastly." as one of their products, Marvin, put it.
Come the revolution I don't think there will be nearly enough walls.
It'll be National Service next.
Giving a whole lot, indeed a whole generation, of seriously pissed off young people guns, military drones, artillery etc etc and training them to use the stuff might not turn out quite as envisaged. But please don't let me dissuade anyone.
13A sockets - for we poor colonials in the antipodes these are the beasties (I think): BS1363 socket of which we have been deprived that are, in opinion of the writer, rather ugly plugs and sockets.
Amusingly the Honeywell site retricts access to these beauties when the browser is in in AU. ;)
I don't think either AU or NZ standardised the use of micro usb charging for phones - once CN mandated that, the only android phones you could buy here were so equipped and with support for 2G retired and now 3G you don't have much choice but to purchase a new phone every few years. A lot of models introduced in the last couple of years already have usb C charging so I imagine it will only be the Apple fanbase that will actually notice.
I would have thought to just bug the phone with an old fashioned AM transmitter bug not that any conversation between Trump and Space Karen would be worth the trouble.
This lot of galahs are probably up for a container load of slightly used cones of silence
And peeing on politicians seeking a photo opportunity.
"koalas are almost entirely placid and spend most of their lives sleeping or chewing leaves. They're a terrible metaphor for anything other than languor" ... I imagine could equally be applied to most politicians.
In any case naming these groups and their malware using a systematic taxonomy makes a great more sense than the current meaningless headline grabbing practice as I think a senior CISA official recently remarked.
Hannsen probably had it right about mad Kings not that a few tech billionaire mightn't be tarred with that the same brush.
French? One use to resort to French, if only as a stage convention, when speaking in front of children pas devant les enfants.*
The whole sad affair has descended into little better than a school yard squabble.
* pretty daft if the kids had a French governess - they almost certainly spoke better French than you.
Even NZ apparently has better broadband infrastructure than AU.
Would be ironic if the wide adoption of IPv6 by the developing world eventually were to drive the wider adoption in the recalcitrant west.
An emerging mass market for IPv6 supporting and otherwise non-broken middle boxes might motivate the rest of the world to dump their existing rubbish.
My reading of quoted claims in this Vulture article their current approach is confined to AES (symmetric key.)
Considering the grant seeking behaviour typical of academics in their publish or perish ecosystem, it is arguable whether such ephemeral claims that their approach can be used against other symmetric systems and public (asymmetric) key systems actually carry much weight or conviction.
Time will tell. ;)
Still if you *really* need to keep stuff secret for a lot more than twenty years you probably needed to deal with this twenty years ago. ;)
Possibly choose two.
Honest often precludes always harmless but if it does probably not helpful.
I would have thought hate speech would require hatred or at least malice in the speaker whether latent or covert. An LLM doesn't possess any such capability - the hate in any of its productions is purely human in origin gathered imbibed from the toxic fount of the internet.
apparently the Trump camp have been claiming Biden, Kamala and meteorologists were responsible for Milton. According to one particularly defective partisan the Democrats can control the weather.
I mean to say if they could do that wouldn't they send a hurricane towards Trump central? Hang on,.. ;)
I stumbled over Marina Hyde's Guardian opinion piece in Hurricane Milton has left two worlds in its wake. Elon Musk lives in one of them. The other is called reality. Sort of makes one want to go off and joust with a few windmills - a saner activity than those much of the world is engaged in at this time.
About the time Red Hat/IBM pulled their stroke and the various alternative *ELs were making their pitches I recall reading a blog that looked at that landscape and was wrote a few unpretty things about Kurtzer going back to his time with CentOS but the upshot was that the blogger wouldn't touch Rocky Linux with the proverbial barge* pole.
At the time I was working with RHEL but at home ran CentOS and developer installs of RHEL 7&8 and had AL in a VM.
After retirement not needing support etc I moved everything to AL8 and just run other Linux distros in VMs including RHEL.
One thing about RH support is their list of certified hardware. Running business critical functions on (latest&greatest) gaming kit is more common than one would want to believe. Just the usual absence of ECC ram or non functional EDAC is shudderworthy. Give me middle aged boring Dell etc kit as the BOFH game gives anyone more than enough (unpleasant) "excitment" for one lifetime without dodgy hardware further enlivening the game.
* the daft autocorrect wanted a beige pole.
If I was Satoshi I would have destroyed my ability to prove I'm Satoshi
Todd: "I am not Satoshi!"
Inquisitor: "Can you prove you are Satoshi?"
Todd: "Of course not!"
Inquisitor: "By your own logic if you could prove it, you couldn't be Satoshi but since you can't prove it you must* be Satoshi."
A nod to the Python's Sir Bedivere qua inquisitor.
* substitute with could for validity and to save firewood.
'The Day of the Triffids'.
If you see green lights in the sky, well it's too late really, but if you hear about them I suggest you don't look.
With most of human population glued to their devices I don't think they will see the green lights nor the Triffid stalking them - either way the Triffids aren't likely to go hungry.
Tin foil hat is 4G thing. For 5G it is enough to make a cross with the fingers directed at the transmitter. The beam forming antennas will then avoid you like vampires avoid garlic.
I would have thought a pentacle (pentagram) for 5G?
A small crystal of Ivermectin might deflect these pernicious 5G emanations.
Given the recent employment insecurity in the tech sector and the ongoing de-skilling and off-shoring of tech roles generally and those role traditionally relatively stable, does anyone really wonder why the whole industry is not attracting la crème (nor le lait) from all the potential candidates, let alone from the more practical forward looking female component?
I would guess the attractiveness would order E > S > T with M either top or bottom (⊤,⊥;) depending on the individual.
Accountancy might be as dry as a bone* but is relatively secure employment - in prosperity there are plenty of beans to count, in recession there are plenty of debts to chase and to be accounted for - which will put meat if not on the driest of bones at least on the table.
The idea of a chartered (certifified) AI accountant takes creative accounting to a whole new and hideous level.
Given the human corporate excesses of the noughties put the exploits of the Python's The Crimson Permanant Assurance☆ to shame, what new hell does AI assisted accountancy hold?
For the future minded young the contemporary technology and its current trajectory isn't exactly a force for good - AI and Crypto bros are really going well above and beyond the call of duty in doing their bit to cook the planet.
* or hereabouts, as a dead dingo's dong.
"International Rescue, a clandestine group set up by an American financier and his five sons to save human lives ... doing the right thing – mostly"
I think not instantiated in this world. Doing the thing of the Right might be as close as our world might get.
I wonder when Space Karen turned up in Thailand with his little submarine whether he was channelling Jeff Tracy?
He has the rocket and his cybertruck wouldn't look out of place in Thunderbirds etc, although subsequent events suggest he was was more likely possessed by The Hood.
If his eyes do light up like red leds (or a Cylon's) he can always blame his "special" K intake.
As I think Lady Penelope might have said.
I suspect Sylvia Anderson's hand could be seen in the fashions of her Ladyship's wardrobe and the other marionettes as well as in UFO (and Space: 1999?) Curious how the actual fashions of the future* were somewhat bland in comparision with those envisaged in these productions.
* as indeed was the future itself.
And was educated during the period in which it was considered unnecessary to teach English grammar, as "kids just pick it up"
Colonial but the same applied. I learnt (English) grammar only when I studied French in high school. :)
Unfortunately kids don't just pick it up which renders much of their later written communication illiterate - ranging from unintended ambiguity to utter impenetrablity.
I had to wait until middle age to learn a practical definition of a sentence and then from a non native English speaker - basically that a sentence expresses a single coherent thought or idea. Forget about finite verbs etc ;) By this definition the absence of coherent thought rather precludes the construction of comprehensible sentences.
The passive is maliciously used to conceal the omission of the implicit by whom, by duck shovers and responsibility avoiders or shifters.
Alone worth the price of admission if there were any such impost. ;)
Linus is Finnish? No?
I vaguely recall Finland is/was pretty keen on Latin including web sites entirely in Latin which might explain a few things.
is?
Sounds like we're a commie cowboy ranch which is rich coming from the deranged detritis of a failed fairly unpleasant communist empire.
I assume Maria Z. isn't claiming amongst "competent authorities and departments" that "the United Nations and UNESCO" can be so described although unfortunately she is probably right in claiming they are "literally obliged to pay attention" but free thereafter to ignore.
I think "sudo /bin/rm -rf /" to be certain.
In my past BOFH life there was a time when every clown and his circus wanted an all singing and dancing web site.
Too few hours in the day for this nonsense so "you can have a read-only document tree and IncludesNoExec or you can go to buggery an externally hosted Wordpess site."
(Any requests for PHP* might invite an ex fenestrā introduction to the car park.)
After a few months these clowns' sites were unmaintained and basically abandoned, the owner having moved on to a newer glittering toy.
In any case I was never troubled by web server issues. Those hosted internally were mostly static and a couple owned by fairly cluey people pushed all the cleverness out to the client. (This before web2 was really a thing.) ECMAscript/Javascript, CSS and DOM also seem pretty horrible but again not my problem.
* in the early '00s it was rare for a month to pass without one or more CERT or AUSCert bulletins about a serious flaw in php[4?] - really best avoided. :)
why not have the camera "always on?" No cleverty between the camera and screen. If Tesla's brilliant software needs to tap into the stream it can do in parallel.
Cars that have poor rear vision or larger blind spots drive me to distraction.
I am sure Space Karen will find a way to blame Kamala et al. even if only by implication - "It wouldn't happen under a Trump administration."
for someone to port Linux to the Lego Technic Turing machine. ;)
I still remember coding simple functions in Turing machine 4-tuples as part of a third year undergrad. mathematical logic course - must have been scarred for life:) - actually I remember it wasn't too bad one you got the hang of it.
"In the end, Sable agreed to pay Cloudflare $225,000"
Demolished the Troll's bridge... and made the Troll pay to cart the rubble away. ;)
Of the two outstanding patents the jury found one hadn't been infringed and the other was invalid.
The link is in this article viz https://blog.cloudflare.com/patent-troll-sable-pays-up/ but still worth reading for Sable's Borcher's testimony. He clearly admits the business is entirely ambit law suits - little more than a protection racket.
I want this. No longer do I need to squirm and cringe in the morning when saying hello to my cow-orkers using a generic greeting because their name is...um...er... Emily? Anna? Something with a vowel in it?
You could probably get away with a static gallery of images with names projected inside your glasses. Or convince the office to put a staff photo board on the wall opposite where you normally encounter these 'orkers. I too cannot put names to faces but garments to names works fine although the individuals involved have less personality than their attire. Workday wardrobes don't normally sport the variety of recreational or party wear so works reasonably well over a week or two.
The Philosophy Department at the University of Woolloomooloo* uniquely solved this problem.
Apparently it is quite common for people with dyscalculia to have trouble with people's names. I wonder what the connection is between numbers and names? Hmm, sometimes I feel like my brain is an undocumented instruction; it does something but not quite right.
Seemingly not vice versa - a well known science broadcaster in Australia has trouble recognising faces but with a higher degree in the physical sciences presumably doesn't suffer from discalculia.
* warning: even for the Pythons this is very politically incorrect by today's standards.
stop supplying the products customers knew they wanted?
Now it's pretty much the Python Cheese Shop sketch [video] except lacking the satisfactory conclusion.
I would have thought if a customer were prepared to pay you $100-$200 for your tat but without any further connection with your business you would take their money and speed them on their way.
Fortunately home users that don't need the full brain damage of Office have a few alternatives to choose from - both paid and libre.
If MS manage to BSOD users' PCs with an unsolicited Office2024 update even the most loyal MS disciple might turn apostate.
./busybox lists the programs that it implements.
A lot of router/embedded Linux devices using busybox don't (sym)link all the programs that they built busybox to implement. Can be very useful if you need a program busybox provides - ./busybox program args...
These days the likes of Poettering &co would have had a daemon busyboxd and and a client busyboxc that passes commands etc via IPC to the daemon. ;)
I am guessing Pentium IV motherboard?
I wouldn't have bothered. Even in their time they were slower than the PIII (coppermine?) which didn't use the expensive RDRAM.
I had about thirty of these P4 these in a Beowulf cluster that were no end of trouble. Glad to see the end of them too. Fortunately being 32 bit and even with the best kernel/user memory split the limited address spaces meant they weren't particularly useful for scientific computing and were quickly shunned when amd64/x86_64 systems were available a few years later.
I did scavenge all their ram on their way to ewaste (~30 × 4G) as the stuff was then still fairly expensive. Unfortunately I never got to make a quid on that haul. :(
iLast thing I took home from the IT departments "get rid" pile , thinking I'd make some money was three 21" CRT Dell monitors , never used , boxed.
Approximately 2008 I reckon. Just at the point CRT became yesterdays news.
I was reading something about the retro computing & gaming communities which mentioned how difficult it was to get CRT monitors. Perhaps an opportunity there although hanging one off a mono Hercules card (MDA/HGC) isn't likely to fly nor a CGA card I suspect.
Having had to move the bloody great SGI workstation monitors (relabeled Sony Trinitrons?) I was glad to see the back of CRT monitors. Hint: Office chairs with hydraulic/pneumatic lift make excellent trolleys for moving these beasts without actually lifting them but does rather bugger the wheels. (Bring up the seat level with the desk, drag the monitor etc onto the seat, push chair to destination and don't use your office chair. :)
Although Musk is indeed a foul dog.
Not really fair to actual canines.
More in the brain eating larva migrans mold (so beloved by Beth Mole over on arse technical) than man's best friend, I would have thought.
Many would be hoping Space Karen refuses to pay the fine and X is banned and blocked in AU. In the local vernacular "good riddance to bad rubbish."
While never a DB chap, I always took an interest in data (and knowledge) representation and storage.
A book that I read in the 1990s viz
Logical Introduction to Databases, John Grant OUP 1995
made me appreciate that the relational model was logical abstraction that could mostly be divorced from its physical implementation. This was a major point in Codd's original paper. Whether you used SQL or QUEL or similar you could locate data without any understanding of how it might be stored ie declarative in nature.
I guess many of the arguments are about ACID and other properties which span both the logical and physical aspects of databases.
As always "you pays your money and makes your choice."
I am gratified to note that Postgres is alive and kicking (arse? ;) which must give Michael Stonebraker some pleasure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
Gorgeous! The comment on performance did it for me. ;)
Mr Squiggle: "I suggest you pipe your data to /dev/null, it will be just as fast."
If that holds out, maybe my next Windows OS will be Windows Server if this CoPilot crap can't be avoided easily enough.
Funny you say that. Many years ago I was trying to install Win7 onto a spare 1U server just to run a dongle locked license server. Couldn't get Win7 to activate* the Enterprise license from the kms(?) service. Not primarily (nor secondarily) a Windows body I contacted the enterprise's windows support which was a waste of time as expected. Failing any obviously solution, I installed Windows Server 2008r2 which activated and ran the license service straight away.
But what struck me was that 2008R8 was like a nicer more usable and I daresay more stable version of Win7 and at the time I thought if I had to run Windows then I would try to run the corresponding server version.
* apparently server firmware doesn't/didn't have embedded OEM Windows licenses required for Win7 Enterprise licensing.
"Copilot+ PCs will receive Generative Fill and Generative Erase in Paint"
The only reason I used Windows for many years was to screen capture the steps to install particular specialised applications under Windows to be used on a self service web page. (A mix of "challenged" users and third rate software [and vice-versa.])
I found pasting the captured images into Paint to crop and annotate (usually with big red ticks, arrows, Xs or underlines.) was a lot easier than ffaffing about with the much more featured GIMP on Linux. Simple tools for simple jobs (and simpler people.)
I suspect with Paint+AI, Paint is transformed from simple to simply unusable.
Fortunately nowadays I can look, as a disinterested spectator, on this train wreck with nothing more than a little schadenfreude.
Altman had been the one who departed with the rest staying. But I guess that didn't actually work out. ;)
I shouldn't be surprised that in seven or eight years the only real benefit from AI/LLM will be that my (pen) tablet will be able to better read my handwriting. G-Board already does a pretty reasonable job and might currently use some basic LLL technology. Can only dream of the day when one might enter math formulae as one writes on paper (and have it converted to latex or mathcad etc. ;)
As an Australian, checks are a Pain In The A$$ (PITA). You have to physically attend a branch to deposit them and often the funds are not available for 3 days.
Not quite so. Cheques can be deposited online eg NAB Mobile Cheque Deposit limited to AUD5,000 per seven days for personal accounts (and I think AUD20,000 for business accounts.)
I did this once with a AUD1.00 "cashback" cheque from a product promotion when living in a remoter area where "finding a bank branch that is open nearby is nigh on impossible" was already a problem.
I still use a personal cheque to pay for purchases or services requiring a completed paper form - otherwise I am expected to provide card details to which I am averse.
If am still here in 2030 *and* cheques are no longer, I will likely use a stored value card as a stop loss measure which I normally do anyway for online payments.
Compared to Austalia's banks US banks appear decidedly dogdy* but is there actually anything left in the US that isn't?
* I imagine Wayne and Arthur now reside in the US and are prospering.
Like when he called the rescue diver, who was out there saving lives, a paedo and somehow - unbelievably - got away with it.
I would have thought the pædoguy slander alone, without the later defamation proceedings, would have pretty much put Space Karen on the "not be missed" list of any rational person. Certainly did for me and I would not have touched anything even remotely connected in any way with that miserable worm.
His promised departure for Mars cannot come too soon but I supposed that will on be after he loses his cage fight with his Meta fellow traveller.
We are so fucked. Is there any way to move Australia into another dimension? Or out of the darkest timeline?
Bit confused? How is ostracising just Australia from this world going to deliver the US?
I am not sure I want to live in the dungeon dimension or a world with a green sky and a purple sun.
my immediate thoughts on reading this:
Stupid is as stupid does
When you have ssh agent forwarding and use pam_ssh_agent_auth to authenticate sudo requests it is pretty obvious I would have thought that your local nominally unprivileged account is effectively root on at least these remote systems.
Hardly better than piping from curl/wget some arbitrary shell script from the internet into sudo /bin/bash -s
everyone to have their own back yard iron smelter
Bog iron? ;)
I understand Terry Pratchett on receiving his knighthood forged his own sword with the assistance of a blacksmith from bog iron with a small addition of meteoric iron.
Typical Pratchett: "It annoys me that knights aren't allowed to carry their swords," he said. "That would be knife crime."
More than a little Pratchett in commander Vimes, I think.
but headline image which initially looked to me like a pig (boar) but looking at the raw picture is more likely a bear which, in either case, looked like the beast had its tongue well and truly inserted into the governor's ear.
Clearly they like it very different in the Golden State. ;)
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