Posts by Bebu

Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law

I guess its halloween...

《Who remembers Mrs Marsh and Colgate Flurigard - it's WHY I won't buy their products and the "see, it does get in!"》

That is a long time ago. Apart from wondering at the time why Rod Marsh's mum was hawking this stuff :) I imagined that it would had to have been a pretty terminal case of osteoporosis for ink to penetrate teeth.

Fastforward a few decades and it does appear toothpastes containing much higher concentrations of fluoride than Mrs Marsh's offering are actually beneficial. See https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Fluoride-HealthProfessional

So she was possibly not as daft as she appeared.

NASA to equip International Space Station with frikkin lasers (for comms)

Re: How big?

《 "This optical module is described as being the size of a microwave"

So somewhere between 1mm and 30cm? Not very precise.》

I was thinking the oven so a bit bigger than a cubesat.

I was wondering whether there is any restriction on deploying serious military lasers on orbiting platforms apart from getting enough power(energy) to operate them? While not likely to be of any use against terrestrial targets the absence of air could make such lasers quite effective against assets that spend at least some time above stratosphere. Reagan's star wars project (SDI) might not have been quite as brain dead as he appeared.

More imagination...

《There was a Crew Rescue Vehicle - Experimental for the Shuttle which allegedly got cancelled because it's acronym was too close to a lady-part for NASA's bosses》

These NASA bosses had more vivid imaginations than mine. Alas, I simply cannot get any specifically female anatomical feature from CRV or CRVES (surely not "curves.") If there were an X involved I might think cervix.

The canned emergency crew return vehicle project's code: X-38 when rotated anticlockwise 90 degrees appears to have a more feasible reference to the more interesting lady parts.

Critical updates for NASA telecommunication services hopefully would suffer an anacronym miscarriage at conception.

Still during the '80s there were legions of IT man(age|gle)ment that proudly proclaimed themselves as management information science managers and were quite happy with the title MISmanager which I suppose had the merit of veracity. When I think of "management information science" it would have to be an oxymoron but cannot see where "oxy" could come into it - bugger all management, even less information and science only if think astrology is.

Meta decides to Just Say No to Oversight Board requests and allow paid posts for ketamine

Years ago...

I remember many, many years ago in a pharmacology course ketamine was discussed as a dissociative anaesthetic used in veterinary practice but not generally used medically because of the unacceptable risk of fatal seizures.

The lecturer described ketamine anaesthesia as the patient being fully conscious while having his arm sawn off with the attendant pain but just not caring. :) I would hope not remembering but including a decent dose of valium could see to that.

Came as a real surprise years later that ketamine had become a drug of abuse. That Musk admitted to using ketamine did not come as a surprise.

British isles ... crumpets right after ... - glad the bakery item was plural :)

The British don't do kinky - right?

BOFH: Adventures in overenthusiastic automation

"a target audience of the aged and/or mentally feeble."

"a target audience of the aged and/or mentally feeble."

Given this boss was hooked by said catalog and assuming the boss is not yet in OAP territory taking the disjunction as the weaker constraint we can logically conclude the boss must be mentally feeble.

I suppose the C-suite had an inkling that with a more intellectually challenged appointment the attrition rate of BOFH's bosses would be lower and not having WH&S *not insisting* on bricking up all the external windows would be a major cost saving.

More seriously the idea of having sneaky autonomous mobile devices that are networked with significant computational capabilty skulking about the workplace potentially capturing audio-visual and wifi/bluetooth traffic (or plugging themselves into a RJ45 socket) is a security nightmare well past BOFH's amber alert - even without considering where these things are generally made. If you lose sleep over Huawei kit or HIKvision cameras...

I wonder did these robovacs pre-date Red Dwarf's skutters?

Re: Damnit

Glad to see that both of yor are still in the land of the living but 2.5 hours of exposure to beancounting drivel has to be cruel and unusual punishment.

"well I hope it was coffee." Lucky if it wasn't a laxette mocha or worse (eg antabuse or ipec syrup.)

Infosys co-founder calls for youth to work 70-hour weeks

At 70 hrs/week call centres are going to be even more fun :(

Customer support from sleep deprived call centre staff is going is going to be hallucinatory.

You might get away with these hours with process work but I cannot see even cost/unit productivity improving assuming there is any semblance of quality control. QC is arguably what tranformed Japanese post-war manufacturing rather than longer working hours.

As for knowledge based tasks the hours are irrelevant. Taking as long as you need to properly understanding the task/problem followed by a long think about all the interactions and ramifications implicit in the task/problem *before* applying your experience, knowledge and wisdom to initiate any action might take days or weeks. Also goes without saying that consultation and documentation at each stage is implicit.

Jumping to "initiating action" is almost certainly going to need fewer hours but almost certain to end in tears. Indeed el Reg's are a weekly chronicle of cockups that could be attributed to such "productivity gains."

Anyway its reassuring that the Anglosphere, or the West generally, hasn't cornered the market in arseholes

Larry Ale-ison institute invests in Oxford pub linked to Tolkien, CS Lewis

Makes you think...

Compared with the likes of Larry, Musk, etc etc the White Witch (Jadis) wasn't all that bad... maybe not... but she had more style and arguably more brains. Even Sauron was more organized... :) These villains are all half arsed and not properly evil.

Re: Bring back the Aunt Sally!

《only only Aunt Sally I have ever seen (this was 1960s).》

There was the character in the original Worzel Gummidge tv series ca about the same time. Might be the same one :)

When you think about lobbing large heavy spherical chunks of wood at an effigy of a woman today you would be pretty much automatically handed a AVO banning you from approaching any female within 50m. (Members the UK cabinet exempted :)

Forget the outside hacker, the bigger threat is inside by the coffee machine

Seriously though...

《I thought for sure you were going to talk about remote microphones glued to the back of the coffee machine or about the outsourced cleaning crew.》

Drink and snack dispensing machines have "phoned home" for more than a decade. (Many have small aerials poking above the back of the machine.) I can imagine similarly serviced coffee (espresso) machines or even water coolers might already do the same. How difficult (as in *not*) to instrument these machines, hidden in plain sight, to capture audio, video and wifi/bluetooth?

Re: Perfect security

《None of our employees have the faintest idea what we do, why we do it, who the customer is or how it works -》

I think I have worked there. Unfortunately. :(

Actually when I think of it - what does BOFH's employer do in the way of business?

Canada goosed as attackers shutter hospitals and China deepfakes its politicians

The Blackboard in the background is a bit of a contrast :)

I know SFA about CA politics/politicians but I a pretty sure Trudeau isn't exactly the full bottle on statistical thermodynamics (or whatever the math on the blackboard is.)

Most politician couldn't balance their cheque book...

Microsoft creates a new kind of credential: the 'Applied Skill'

Re: As much as I like the idea, I doubt it will really catch on

"I won't work with someone who is not certified".

Not too keen to work with someone who *is* actually "certified" at least as defined in a relevant mental health act (section-ed/-able... thinking BOFH class here. :)

Certifications and qualifications generally are pretty much a case of "gate keeping" which in some domains might have some utility but really, in the absence of verifible experience and credible referees, they don't amount to much.

That script I wrote three years ago is now doing what? How many times?

Re: Indiana immediately owned up to … absolutely nothing

《the last thing he wanted to do was actually go and look at the thing for himself. That's how you get your face melted off.》

Nice touch equating the Ark of Convenant's face melting capability with this Indy confronting his past crimes against IT.

Still got a job at the end of this week? You're lucky, as more layoffs hit the tech industry

Re: No poets got fired last week.

"what is Wireshark"

You mean "Ethereal"? :) Still prefer tcpdump as the first cab of the rank.

But the point is well made. The question might have been more exploratory such as "what network traffic analysis tools have you used?" Followed by "can you describe a problem that these tools have helped you resolve?"

Oddly I have a nasty suspicion that the mind of a poet could a far better handle on the bigger picture in most disciplines including IT than current management but that is not really saying much.

Sorry kids, Infosys and Wipro have cancelled graduate recruitment

Re: Manglement

"pyramid optimization" - bigger at the bottom and pointy at top is a good start.

"onshore offshore rationalization" - more commonly known as "here" and "there." Probably as in "neither here nor there."

Odd that there is no "Dummies' Guide to Manglement: Practice and Language."

Come work at HQ... or find a new job, Roblox CEO tells staff

Re: Return

"cultural melting pot"

Also in the Petri dish sense of "culture" in my experience of open plan.

'forced fun' - always wondered how many of participants seriously considered adding something more lethal to the paintballs. (More vive la résistance :)

Being well out of the fray, I am guessing in the longer term those enterprises that persevere in this foolishness will in the near term be unable to replace the (even the exempted) talent when they choose to move on and in the longer term be unable to compete with more flexible and agile enterprises (possibly founded by these earlier emigre.) The C-suites in most North American enterprises appear to be stuffed with the dreaded Dino-Babies - or if not saurians at least reptiles.

What did the VisiCalc fairy bring you for Spreadsheet Day?

Basically the spawn of the devil...

Although I have to admit in the dark ages* a secretary (office admin in todayspeak) used Excel on a classic mac quite effectively as a diary cum filofax with nary a number in sight other than dates and times. Numbers are sin, calculations damnation. Used macwrite for letters (paper, envelope, stamp.) The office ran extremely efficiently until she left.

*About the time Windows 2.0 was released.

Thousands of Teslas recalled over brake fluid bug

Surprised....

I was surprised Teslas had hydraulic brakes :)

I assumed in Musk's best of all possible worlds, the breaking would be all electric - regenerative breaking to slow down and emergency breaking - shove in a pile of amps from the battery to give it a bit of welly. Of course all under the control of the included safety critical software. :)

Drive in a Tesla? Sorry mate I'll stick to my Leyland P76 ;)

X marks the bot: Musk thinks spammers won't pay $1 a year

Re: Elmo just desperately needs the money.

I would think a US VP in the first instance would have to be eligible to be US president. If not I would think an ineligible VP would still be passed over to the next in line - House Speaker (no one at home at the moment :), Senate President pro tem (not the VP.)

So Elmo being the VP in a revenant Trump administration in some dystopia would be typical Muskian exercise in futility.

Re: PLEAAAAASE give me some money, any money

《Elmo just desperately needs the money.》

Brother, can you spare a dime?

In Elmo's case the next line is a bit suspect:

They used to tell me I was building a dream

He ain't.

Re: Thanks for the belly laugh, I needed that

《I'm not really sure why Ireland isn't as popular》

I suspect one reason is that if you really screw up, NZ is such a small place, pretty much at the other side of the world, that anyone in N. America or Europe isn't going to take much notice. To be honest in AU we don't much notice either other than remark that the sheep must be getting a break.

Another reason might be that NZ is/was? the residence of Kim Dotcom who might have shat in Musk's nest in the past.

Tesla goons will buy anything – including these $150 beers

Re: consider branding yourself with a Tesla Branding Iron

the branding iron, I presume it's for Tesla owners to apply in the bedroom

"Now you've put that image in my head I can't escape the thought that with the possibility of infinite realities/universes/the multiverse someone somewhere is actually doing that."

I wouldn't need too long odds to wager some party or other in this universe is already engaged or soon to engage in these erotic shenanigans without needing the luxury of multiverses or an Everettian Multiworld.

Fortunately I guess the majority of putative Tesla branding iron owners are very unlikely to be accompanied on this perverse escapade or any other.

I have an image of some Aeon Flux* lookalike repeatedly applying the Tesla brand (circle tin tack) to the bare buttocks of an on all fours, naked Musk.

*Thinking of the MTV animated series character.

Looking at the actual iron I suspect it wouldn't be much use for practical branding on a ranch.

Re: What would George think

《I think we can be pretty accurate in guessing what Eric Arthur Blair would have thought about his Muskiness and I can assure you it would not be complimentary, not even a little bit.》

I would like to think he might pluck an Aspidistra from the air and implant it in a suitable part of Musk's anatomy.

British boffins say aircraft could fly on trash, cutting pollution debt by 80%

Who left the gate open?

Fueling jets with municipal solid waste reminded when I was a student many years ago of someone suggesting jumbo jets (Boeing 747s) could fly on coke (as in steel making not the Columbian sort.) I can imagine academia being what it is, this individual has clambered up the greasy pole and might be responsible for this.

I would thought the local chippy's used frying oil might be a better bet. In most parts of the world it would be vegetable oil so by definition a biofuel. (Some independence minded parts of the UK might use solid paraffin.)

China requires any new domestic Wi-Fi kit to support IPv6 and run it by default

The Cultural Evolution - little leap forward :)

I would have thought mandating ISPs preferentially, or only, offering ipv6 address ranges to devices that (soon must) support ipv6 is the not undesirable result.

If your ISP chucked a /96 (say) routing prefix at your router any number of your devices could happily autoconfigure or dhcp6 from the router. Of course that prefix would identify the customer's traffic which is a problem for some in the Middle Kingdom and elsewhere.

The default firewall rules on the router should be pretty strict as every device would have a unique routable ipv6 address.

When I think of the amount of pissing about to make a couple of services on rfc1918 addresses inside an internal network visible externally even this might actually be a win for security.

New routers presumably would offer one or more 4-to-6 solutions for legacy ipv4 only client devices.

Getting ISPs to offer and properly support ipv6 for residential customers is the bigger problem in these parts. Perhaps the offer of a state sponsored vacation in a reeducation facility might ginger them up. :)

As it prepares to abandon its on-prem server products, Atlassian is content. Users? Not so much

Re: The Blackadder view of cloud

《I'd no more place my systems in the hands of a cloud operator than I'd place my john thomas in the hands of a lunatic with a pair of scissors.》

Loony Scissorhands is only going to remove the conductor not the orchestra - your cloud operator has your family jewels so at some point there is a real risk that you are only going to be competing against counter tenors.

The John McCarthy award?

《I feel like opening and successfully closing three levels of parenthesis with a degree of elegance calls for some sort of award》

LISP (or Scheme) doesn't get much of a nod here - and surely LISP etc would consume the lion's share of the global production of parentheses. :)

Excel Hell II: If the sickness can't be fixed, it must be contained

Deja vu?

"This allows them to bring their knowledge of the situation to the table rather than hoping ML will spot random anomalies. AI could certainly help suggest questions and drive a graph that would lead to the right kind of schema."

Sounds a lot like the "expert systems" that were a focus of the previous AI vogue in the 1980-90s.

I suspect some organization's "business rules" aren't entirely rational or internally consistent (not just X/Twitter.) Humans are pretty good at coping with this nonsense. Indeed the typical social media user believes far more than the Red Queen's six impossible things before breakfast.

If you're brave enough to move fully-laden datacenter racks, here's the robot for you

don't forget to unplug your rack before moving it.

I was imagining something really clever that maintained the power supply and network/interconnects(infiniband?) wirelessly while moving the rack. :)

Years and years ago I finessed a running *nix mail server onto a trolley and transferred the redundant power supplies to a ups on the trolley and wheeled it to another location (due to an unplanned extended outage.) Wifi wasn't then a big thing :( so it was disconnected for 5-10 minutes.

GNOME developer proposes removing the X11 session

Have to look at 9wm and 9menu again :)

Actually use Openbox these days but it appears to depend on some (i)gnome-ous stuff so it might be terminal too.

(Many) years ago I ran 9wm and 9menu (X11) but had to move to Oroborus I think when the Netscape browser wouldn't display its menus.

By the time I discovered Cwm my gray cells were too old to remember all the key sequences :( - not big on emacs either.)

9front might be suckless but when compared with an angry penguin or a wicked daemon their mascot which resembles demented if not homicidal bunny isn't a compelling advertisement.

UK silicon startups to share £1.3M chump change as part of chip strategy

Re: describes itself as an "unconventional computation company" that is still in stealth mode

《All conventional CPU dies are square and have limitations. Our new CPU is round, therefore unconventional and therefore logically doesn't have the same limitations》

Ouroborus Design and Fabrication^TM uses a breakthrough Mobius strip wafer technology which utilizes its unique single sidedness to optimize chiplet interconnects and other novel design opportunities this technology offers to realize our unique semiconductors' unchallenged capabilities, features and performance.

The next generation will seek to weld together two of our first generation wafers into a Klein bottle configuration for an order of magnitude scale up in chip capabilities and performance.

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

Pencil and paper...

24 candidates per region x number of regions can not be too many - the article had 400 total candidate (16 2/3 regions doesn't add up?)

Ranking 400 candidates by hand isn't rocket science just tedious.

Assuming each region had a different selection panel you might do some stats to adjust the raw scores before ranking.

Existing software to do this stuff is common enough in the education sector.

Re: Excel for dodgy databases

hire a FORTRAN wizard and get it done right.

I know even Dartmouth BASIC in the hands 15 year old student could do better than this spreadsheet FU. (I admit nothing... :)

When I first saw VisiCalc I knew it was it was a bloody silly idea - like giving razor blades to toddlers - definitely going to end in tears. Lotus just confirmed this and Excel with bells.

As far as I could see the main attraction was the grid layout for the output (and input). For me it made more sense to construct your model in some declarative notation which could be easily audited. Attaching a view and controller to the model wouldn't normally undermine the validity of the model.

At the time I reckoned I could do better with SmallTalk-80 - not that I had the hardware or the USD2k for the ST-80. :(

BOFH: We've made a big mesh, Boss. That's what you wanted, right?

Re: Ahhhh the

fear because she's learned her training so well.

I think she has graduated summa cum laude from the Hadian academy of system administration. One might suspect a little cribbing or plagarism from this column. ;) To round out her skills she should probably do a research thesis on constructive defenestration.

I would advise the two of you to have current wills.

Russian Nauka module plays leak-a-boo with International Space Station

Re: ... what was going through their head when they did that?

《The voice of the Mysterons? :-)》

That you Captain Black?

UFO with strings :)

Red Hat retires mailing list, leaving Linux loyalists to read between the lines

The Unix way...

I was just today thinking that it once was the case that simple things were done simply (and hopefully correctly) in ways that were fairly easy to understand and complex things were composed from these simple thing with some hope that the whole would be understandable.

Now we seem to be confronted by behemoths like systemd that are pretty much monolithic slabs which few ever really understand.

Email v discourse fits this pattern. I imagine RSS feeds could be sucked down and recomposed into an email.

Quoting Tennyson's dying Arthur :)

"The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

And God fulfils himself in many ways,

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."

New information physics theory is evidence 'we're living in a simulation,' says author

Perhaps sort of right.

If you think of minutest fragment of space and time as having what we call the laws of physics embedded in it then one might imagine space-time as being an (almost?) infinite distributed (data flow?) computer evaluating some sort of declarative code (physics.)

Of course I guess this poses another metaphysical(?) question of how the universe came into being and why does it have the physical laws it does have rather than something else anthropic principle notwithstanding. Personally I wonder how small does a chunk of space-time have to be as not to be able contain all of physics ie how far down the pile of turtles or tortoises before they start missing bits like a leg or a flipper? ;)

Still if Musk reckons 'tis so its then one can be certain 'taint so beyond even unreasonable doubt.

The glider gun in Conway's life is probably its version of Musk. :)

All in all I think Douglas Adams did a much more amusing job on pontificating on the question of life, the universe and everything.

Re: Nothing new.

《Mr. Popper.》

Sir Karl surely. :)

X confuses the masses by removing all details from links

Lovely picture of a blue burmese [cat]

Leaving aside all the usual X/Twitter/Musk nonsense I enjoyed the picture of the cat lying in a fairly typical pose, against the side of the keyboard.

The burmese [cat] is very attractive breed - a bit like the siamese with less of the attitude. :)

It's time to celebrate the abysmal efforts to go paperless in the NHS

Carbon capture credits?

The upside of all that paper being stored for long period is that it is not returning to the atmosphere (CO2.)

Perhaps the NHS can offset some of the costs with carbon credits. :)

Records of defunct patients could be permanently archived in old worked out coal mines (carbon capture. :)

Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025

So we'll be back where we were about ten years ago

《So we'll be back where we were about ten years ago》

On what reflection what in the last decade has been an improvement? SFA I suggest.

Not that 2013 was brilliant but the utter crapiness of the last few years just makes it appear so.

AI girlfriend encouraged man to attempt crossbow assassination of Queen

The weapon looks like something from Ankh-Morpork (Discworld)

Looks a bit like what I imagine their "spring gonne" would.

I recall his Grace etc, Commander Vimes had a singular opinion about that weapon which would see any possessor having a short audience with the Patrician and off to the Tanty for attention of Mr One-drop Trooper.

Can't fathom why the late Queen rather than a descendent of the Viceroy (actually Governor General) in 1919 (Lord Chelmsford.)

ELKS and Fuzix: Linux – and Unix – writ very, very small

"Lots of impressive, valuable software has been lost to history"

I was wondering about Cromenco's cromix which vaguely recall was a unixy monitor/control program/os for 8080/Z80 (S100?) systems a very long time ago.

I think the Wendin OST, DOS and VMS and Unix workalikes disapeared long ago. (PC software)

Cat accused of wiping US Veteran Affairs server info after jumping on keyboard

One solution...

While a cat might operate a keyboard it is probably beyond the bounds of the possible for one to use a pen (stylus.) Pen based input should stymie these feline terrorists but I suspect also inhibit a fair number of humans apparently incapable of writing even their own name. Voice input might also serve but then a pet parrot could cause havoc.

Big Brother is coming to a workplace near you, and the privacy regulator wants a word

Re: "or offsite [...]outside work hours.

《Well, to be fair, he'd check out the code in the morning (call it "A"), then in the evening he'd check back in a completely different bit of code that did the exact same thing (call it "B"). The next day, he'd check out B, re-write the comments in "A", and check that back in. The following day, he'd check out A again, re-write the comments in "B", and check that in. Lather, rinse repeat. For well over a year. I almost fell sorry for him when I caught him at it.》

The real crime here is that he didn't automate the whole process with a few scripts and cron or batch job. ;)

《Management was really, really pissed off at me, though ... because I exposed a whole bunch of similar shenanigans that had been happening under their noses. They were fired en-masse.》

Unfortunately I know it wasn't the management that were fired. However deserving never happens.

Re: Dumb companies equate activity with productivity

《Getting dangerously close to becoming a cynical BOFH....》

Embrace the dark side. :)

The management restructuring possibilities of the open window can then be fully appreciated. :)

I mean the assisted plummet of a manager invariably results that manager's restructuring.

City council Oracle megaproject got a code red – and they went live anyway

Re: Product not suitable

《"...it's complicated and you wouldn't understand..." I can do Quantum Field Theory and General Relativity.》

I suspect Brumy City Council Accounting Theory isn't renormalizable.

A distant relation to Douglas Adam's Bistromath perhaps.

How is it that Boris Johnson and his defective crew aren't responsible for this fiasco?

ChattyG takes a college freshman C/C++ programming exam

C++

Training one of these AI/ML thingies on the corpus of the last three decades of actual C++ code (as against C) should send it gaga and produce the apparent impossibility of even more inpenetrable code. I can imagine the Sieve of Eratothenes being implemented with a generous helping of gratuitous templates and exceptions. :) What it obscenities it might inflict of a bubble sort let alone quicksort doesn't bear thinking about.

The code that first year (freshman) students normally submit is sufficiently nightmarish with taking it to this new level.