Posts by Bebu

Beta driver turned heads in the hospital

The 5000 Fingers of Dr T

"scared the bejeezus out of me"

Dr Phibes did it for me.

The head of a unicorn propelled across a room (and street) and impaling the good doctors victim is an enduring memory. :)

PhD student guilty of 3D-printing 'kamikaze' drone for Islamic State terrorists

Not the brightest tool in the shed.

If these nutters weren't occasionally, and often accidentally, capable of mass homicide they would be a joke.

"The Life of Brian"'s "People's Front of Judea" (PFJ) ["What have the Romans ever done for us?"] would appear to be better organized.

Application forms, social media posts, weekly reports and chemical weapon/explosives documentation - only a police background check and working with children clearance appear to be missing.

Suppose we should be grateful that this lot were standing in the queue for a second helping of stupidity when the cluestick was being swung.

EFF urges Chrome users to get out of the Privacy Sandbox

MRDA?

《Google contends the EFF is just spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt. "We believe the safe use of data can improve user experiences,"》

To paraphrase the delightful Ms Rice-Davies "They would say that would they."

Perhaps big G actually meant the EFF is just spreading (well founded) fear, (understandable) uncertainty, and (reasonable) doubt.

My being able to definitively specify that Google is not to use my data would definitely improve my experience.

UTM: An Apple hypervisor with some unique extra abilities

Found UTM Rather useful on a recent macbook.

UTM would install a freebsd 13 VM when virtualbox wouldn't look at it (or oddly anything else.)

Never heard of UTM until then. Never a great fan of apple or macs so it figures.

AMD's latest FPGA promises super low latency AI for Flash Boy traders

What could possibly go wrong?

High speed trades, derivatives, AI/ML which has exactly 0.0 insight in adversary with same - going to Hell in handbasket but now with a supersonic ramjet attached.

Musk, Yaccarino contradict each other on status of X's election integrity team

Re: Wendy, I’m home!

《I think of the Twitter (X) headquarters like the Overlook Hotel.Jack Nicholson roaming the halls with a fire axe…》

Same actor different movie. Thinking "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" :)

At least one of the afflicted in the Twitter Cuckoo Nest needs a daily dose of ECT.

Long-term support for Linux kernels is about to get a lot shorter

Other options?

If one only really wanted a stable Unix/Posix kernel/userland system to build on the various enterprise linux distros are one option but another option might be a *BSD distro (FreeBSD has ~5 year support for major releases) or an IllumOS based distro (eg OpenIndiana.) I suspect the kernel internals and interfaces in the BSDs and IllumOS change far more slowly and with fewer breakages than might be the case with the Linux kernel.

As an example I was really impressed SmartOS (based on IllumOS) especially in that it supported *both* kvm and bhyve virtualization.

Re: Like the meme

《... that most developers want to be at the cutting edge of development, be it for the glory of acknowledgment or simply the exciting challenge of the constantly-changing project.》

And these same developers often have chutzpah to call themselves software engineers when they frequently have little more common sense or focus than a kitten chasing a laser pointer.

Re: Hold on Now!

《Who could possibly be tired of PowerPoint presentations and words like "synergy" and "leverage". They're the reason we get out of bed in the mornings, aren't they?》

Probably why I try to leave the latter until the afternoon :)

As the late Mrs Parker was reported to say in response to the doorbell ringing (and I suspect to the sunrise): "What fresh hell can this be?"

For me Teams, Zoom, Slack etc are the fiends of this fresh hell, Powerpoint having become a rather stale daemon.

CERN experiment proves gravity pulls antimatter the way Einstein predicted

Now what am I going to do with it?

《That rules out my plans for an anti-gravity drive based on a magnetically bound pot of antimatter. Now what am I going to do with it?》

So not Cavorite then.

Still a pot of say 1.0 kg of antihydrogen when "reacted" hydrogen very slowly should make a pretty decent rocket engine.

Slowly as 1kg x (300,000km/s)^2 an inconvenient number of Joules :)

Switch to hit the fan as BT begins prep ahead of analog phone sunset

The aftermath of the next Carrington event will be something to behold.

Might solve a lot of problems :)

I imagine not much post mid-Victorian technology would survive. Steam locomotives. Pre 1980s motor vehicle could probably have the electricals replaced or repaired but anything with actual electronics would have to be backported :)

Undeniably tragic if all the Tesla EV batteries were to explode during such an event. Yes tragic... still...

Just about everything that has 'disrupted' life from the late 2000s would be kaput and much more besides.

Possibly the one situation where the 'preppers' have got a point. Still a mob of raving loonies imho.

The parts of the world where people live "off grid" because there never was any grid are likely to be least affected.

Are these powered from the DC supply at the switch in the same way as POTS?

《Are these powered from the DC supply at the switch in the same way as POTS?》

If its anything like AU NBN it isn't. No power no network.

I have used a 4G/LTE connection which can run from a usb powerbank since ADSL was pulled. Really served its purpose quite a few times. A UPS would serve the same purpose especially if your broadband router and ISP supported a 4G/5G failover.

US Trademark Office still wants to keep faxes, but is willing to try this cloud thing

Still a thing?

I thought faxes had actually died with voip. AU was possibly proprtionally the largest fax users back in the day but with the retirement of the copper POTS and mandated NBN (voip telephony) I assumed faxes had gone the way of the Norwegian Blue.

《Now if only doctor's offices would stop using fax.》

It may be the exception but our Drs get our imagining (X-rays, ultrasound, cat scans and mri) and pathology (lab) results via email and have for quite a while now. I suppose some places might use some sort of fax over Ip arrangement.

I quite liked faxes but some of the machines were peculiarly complicated and often mongrels to operate.

Google killing Basic HTML version of Gmail In January 2024

Do you think Google will ever stop being shitheads?

No. Not before Alphabet goes out of business - not in my time I would think.

I must have another go at getting Alpine to handle the Oauth2 part to do imap/tls with gmail.

Text MUAs must be easier for screen readers to handle. Alpine or Mutt. Others?

An alternative, I guess, is to forward the mail from gmail to a more friendly mail service. Possibly an opportunity for a mail sevice to receive the client's email, scan, process/decrappify (AI/ML?) it into a more accessible format.

Getting older and really noticing the optics are not what they used to be :(

Now IBM sued for age discrim by its own HR veterans

Re: HR...

The late great Sir Terry Pratchett in "A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devilish Devices" also had deficient UU graduates who

《... can look at a sign sayin'

'Human Resources Department' without detecting a whiff of brimstone."》

95% of NFTs now totally worthless, say researchers

Really that daft?

《What they bought was a note on a blockchain (hopefully, that blockchain is still being mined and hasn't just evaporated) and that note said they now owned this copy of a URL》

I would have thought at least one or more crypto hash (eg sha256) or a signature of the gif file would be added to the blockchain entry. I have absolutely no idea how this nonsense was supposed to work but cleary didn't for the punters.

BOFH: A security issue, you say? Activate code tangerine

engagement\moral survey?

Moral or morale?

Based on Andy's detours to his totty from his Plymouth course it could plausibly be either.

"gone to Swindon to distance himself from the lady concerned" so she indoors got to hear about his bit on the side?

Neuralink's looking for participants willing to be part of human trials

If the Neurolink chip does ApplePay...

Musk's loyal disciples will be lining up.

Its all a John Lumic / Cybus Industries style conspiracy for Tesla to harness millions of human brains into a network intelligence to drive Teska's self driving cars so as not to T-bone locomotives or home in on emergency vehicle flashing lights. Based on my exposure to the Musk fanbase the raw material (brains) are sufficient defective to sabotage this cunning plan from the outset. It must be galling to be at best a third rate John Lumic ;)

Data breach reveals distressing info: People who order pineapple on pizza

Elizabeth David on the first chain store pizza in London.

The late Mrs David had some pithy comments, in a newpaper article reviewing a newly open pizza chain store in London, about what did and did not constitute a valid pizza which I would reproduce but the only online quote brings up a musky effing X. Barrington Bradman Bing McKenzie (Barry McKenzie) is fervently implored to insert either end of the pineapple into the X management.

I think ED only admitted (Mozzarella) cheese, black olives and anchovies.

GNU turns 40: Stallman's baby still not ready for prime time, but hey, there's cake

Re: RMS contribution

"OSX came from NextStep which started with a Mach microkernel, didn't it?"

The Apple kernel is (open source) Darwin which always I understood more or less as a BSD 4.4 (FreeBSD) personality on top of a Mach microkernel.

Quoting from https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelProgramming/About/About.html

"Up-to-date versions of the Mach 3 APIs that OS X provides are described in the Mach API reference in the kernel sources. The kernel sources can be found in the xnu project on http://kernel.macosforge.org/."

Would imply there is a fair bit of Mach 3 lurking in there. The DEC OSF/1 kernel had a similar genesis (from memory) but from Mach 2.5.

Not that Mach was directly related to RMS or MIT (was CMU) or to GNU other than the HURD kernel.

If we ostracised (cancelled) all the obnoxious pricks (dicks) in IT and computer science there would be sweet fanny left. Ditto for academia in general, politics and most other arenas.

Sysadmin and spouse admit to part in 'massive' pirated Avaya licenses scam

Re: What a horrible argument

《It's easier to bundle software as one, and have features unlocked as needed.》

My concern is that the unused/locked code is still there leaving a much larger potential target for exploitation.

If the code weren't there it couldn't be exploited.

Given the very low quality of embedded software generally and worse security this is a valid concern. This is undeniably the case for consumer devices but also arguably with business/industrial grade devices.

Bit like buying the same portable computer which is sold to the consumer and the military markets but with the thermite charge only enabled by a software key in the MIL spec device. :)

From the article's headline I would have suspected the BOFH but for the facts a) he was caught b) has a spouse. :)

Textbook publishers sue shadow library LibGen for copyright infringement

Re: They are blocked in France

《When I went to Warwick uni in the early 90s, one of our Maths profs wrote his own book for the course -- "Derek the differentiable dinosaur". It was available for about 5 quid which covered photocopyiong charges, or we were free to photocopy someone else's copy if we wanted to, since it was all public domain."》

In spite of my doubts this talented dinosaur was for real ( thinking 'arry the analytic armadillo :)

"Differentiating Functions of Lots of Variables: Starring Derek the Differentiable Dinosaur : Mathematics and Imagination", Bill Breckon, Warwick University Mathematics Department, 1982

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=548JzQEACAAJ

Unfortunately apparently no (electronic) copy of this slender volume is extant (even on those sites which may not be named :)

'Small monthly payment' only thing that stands between X and bot chaos, says Musk

The plate in the "gentleman's room?"

When I read this last musky thought bubble it brought to mind the long past days when visiting the conveniences (xitter) in more classy establishments there was a liveried attendant who would hand one a pristine hand towel to dry ones hands and on leaving one left silver (2/6?) coin on a white mat on a white plate.

Xitter is definitely not classy but extorting chump change from its users isn't going to improve that. Still the image of Musk in livery soliciting a few bob from those using his tawdry conveniences is priceless.

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Re: if you fail, try, try, try again

"Cinemas have shown adverts for as long as I can remember too. Last time I went, a good few years ago, there was about 15 minutes of ads, followed by 10 minutes of trailers before the film finally started."

With allocated seating you just turn up exactly 30 minute after the scheduled kick off and catch the start of the feature.(Most complexes have bars :)

After living opposite a cinema complex for a couple years and watching few movies this never failed. Also the theatres were mostly empty. I suspect the times are pretty fixed in order for the projectionist to tend all the theatres.

Re: coccyx-centered comforts in cold climes

I reckon you are so cancelled that you were never born - no wishing about it. ;)

One would be treading where angels fear, in going within a light year of defining "woman" - you have half the alphabet and an arithmetical symbol on your case before the usual (very suspect) suspects pile on. I think J. J Rawlings got pretty much incinerated by this sort of nonsense.

Totally confused by field work as it pretty much _does not_ mean farm work in this neck of the woods but rather students' or trainees' practicum or research material collection etc.

Such ex communication quells debate and quashes dissent.

VMware staff reportedly told job cuts may start before Broadcom acquisition

"Comments on The Layoff are anoymous"

annoyed and anonymous? ;)

I can imagine morale at most large tech (and other) companies is now at a historic low.

Chap blew up critical equipment on his first day – but it wasn't his volt

Imperial emf :)

《I suppose we should be grateful that the Americans use volts rather than an archaic system of measurement.》

I can offer to any L.Pondians who don't wish to sully themselves with the cheese eating etc SI units:

foot-pound per imperial standard charge - which presume one might define as the charge on two 1ft×1ft parallel square plates in vacuo separated by 1in which exerts 1lb force :)

If non north americans are curious about their 120V/240V system I found this video https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jMmUoZh3Hq4 enlightening and in AU rather scary (when compared with AS/NZS 3000:2018 Amd 2:2021.)

Probe reveals previously secret Israeli spyware that infects targets via ads

Re: Pathetic Apathy is as Pathetic Apathy does.

《I believe along with the obligatory frog pills - this one is supposed to be taken with a touch of salt.》

I think I would prefer the Dean of the UU any day. Slightly more coherent... and the frog pills usually return him to some sense.

Appears if anyone has the temerity to question the actions or policies of the State of Israel, even, as here, obliquely, the US religous right (purportedly christian) and associated lunatics pop out of the woodwork spouting this sort of incoherent nonsense.

UK civil servants – hopefully including those spending billions on tech – to skill up in STEM

Perhaps leaving the politicians ignorant would be best...

I read once: "Politics is the success of failures."

Not really seen much disconfirmatory evidence since.

The saw "a little knowledge is dangerous" probably applies doubly in this context.

Maybe restricting cabinet to those with Classics Tripos and whose only ability is to quote, inapplicable passages, from Homer or Virgil in the original greek or latin might, prevent much of ideological meddling that has bedevilled more than one nation.

I know Boris has the Oxford equivalent of the Tripos but only a second so probably got the quotes wrong and then only from Apuleius (asinus aureus :) and Catallus. I don't imagine anyone ever got much sense out of him.

Having slammed brakes on hiring, Google says it no longer needs quite so many recruiters

selling American beer to anyone... war crime.

Fortunate that the US isn't a signatory to the ICC.

In any case I imagine Bud could not be called beer in DE under their ancient laws governing the brewing of beer - "Reinheitsgebot."

Re: changing their spots

>>So just what would a (reject) recruiter be good for?

>Components?

Nah... Sure to be Whitworth fine and left hand thread to boot.

The Lie of the Land :)

I think if we haven't all failed the shadow test then the Monks must have taken over in the guise of the search engine and social media megatechs.

Enjoying the Champagne and pushing the plunger might be the better course of action in either case.

Techie labelled 'disgusting filth merchant' by disgusting hypocrite

"The caller had paid the bill, but wasn't happy."

I suspect the caller's unhappiness had more to do with the cost of his son's interest in les femmes déshabillées than the actual provision of the images of the same.

How NSFW could these images be without attracting the attention of the old bill? I suppose in the day Altavista wasn't as willing as Google &c is now to ante up such material (and I imagine much less hrmm... tasteful.)

Probably has a lot to do with the notorious prudery of the English - I can not imagine even at that time an eyebrow would have been raised in AU. Our second public broadcaster SBS used to televised on Friday nights a lot of Continental (EU) and Art films some of which could be an "education" in themselves.

This SBS was later responsible for my seeing "Madame Kovarian" sitting on a bed, starkers singing "Teddy Bears Picnic" to her companion in "Zed and Two Noughts" which was akin to "a paradigm shifting without a clutch.^*" ;)

^*Cancelled

These days you can teach old tech a bunch of new tricks

weighed something like 40KG each.

"F*&£ THAT"

The SGI and Sony branded 21+" monitors were a challenge. Fortunately the office chair seat's pneumatic lift could read the desk's height where these sods could be shimmied onto the chair. Lower chair's seat and push seat to destination and drop monitor from the chair onto some cardboard (for the sake of appearances) and "F*&£ THAT."

Sad to say buggered more office chairs than these monitors :( Most monitors were still working when the great scouring occurred which followed manglement's discovery that LCDs used less energy (and presumably had a lower TCO.)

The crt screen glass was quite pretty when faceted. My father used to try out the fancy new facets using this glass as it was freely available from the local refuse tip, was easy to cut and polish and had a decent refractive index. The tip workers used a decent length of reo rod to prod the tube into imploding.

Google promises eternity of updates for Chromebooks – that's a decade for everyone else

Re: Chromebook Your-Personal-Lifetime Software Updates for Free

Ditto for an old hp intel x86 chromebook. Reflashed the bios and have at various times installed win10, bsd, various linuxes without any problems. The battery always was rubbish so it never got any serious use.

For me the lower case key lettering was always weird although no one else ever seems to notice.

The only reason I would buy a chromebook now is if it had an unusual cpu eg risc-v but if the vendor locks it down there is not much point. More capable risc-v sbc are becoming more common and like a rpi4 / 8g are a better option.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...

《I've seen things you people wouldn't believe, laptops on fire off the shoulder of Orion...》

A nod to one of the Doctor's speeches? :) "The Rings of Akhaten"?

Local governments aren't businesses – so why are they force-fed business software?

"Imagine instead how the world would look if Oracle ran your PC."

Stuff of nightmares.

Won't even let Java near mine. Rather return technologically to the 1960s than let Larry &co near my PC.

I have a nasty feeling we are seeing a world that is very close to that hypothetical dystopia.

If Larry were offering a "spaceship to the future" it would be the Golgafrincham 'B' ark reassembled with a coat of whitewash slapped the cracks.

Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

Re: Amazing delivery from Reg article, as always.

《it's always good to see legacy tech being retired in favor of something with a bright future ahead of it.》

Probably a typo for legacy tech being retired in favor of something with a bright future behind it.

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

Re: Check the power supply

《Wait till you inhale burnt rice after our floormate tried cooking rice in a rice cooker. Parents didn't include the other vital ingredient as well as rice.

Water》

A classic. Gen Mai Char? ;)

Half a clue wouldn't go amiss either.

In these parts, parent used to hand their offspring embarking on life's adventure a copy of The Commonsense Cookbook. I still had my 1970s edition until a few years ago but I had by then been seduced by Elizabeth David and even had a copy of the slightly obscure Culinary Jottings. :)

Elon Musk has beef with Bill Gates because he shorted Tesla stock, says biographer

(Public) school boy antics

Metaphorically Gates debags Musk who in turn gives Gates a wedgie.

Master observing same: "Do grow up gentlemen!"

whether, at this point, even Mars would be far enough away for Twitler to fuck off to.

Immediately brought to mind how Angel Islington in Gaiman's Neverwhere was disposed of by Door (?).

The other side of the Universe I think would a good start. The eternal umpire would have pulled up stumps by the time either Islington or Xitler got back.

IBM Software tells workers: Get back to the office three days a week

If these were Gus' lines from "Drop the Dead Donkey" they would seem over-egged.

"spend more meaningful time together." -- "setting the tone" -- "...we must be better stewards of getting into the office,"

Deserves a trip to the basement (FSB) or carpark (BOFH) in my book.

When has productivity coming off a non-zero base ever been tripled... anywhere? Even the most dunderheaded management has ever been able to suppress productivity to that extent ... that would require incredible creativity.

If empty buildings are worrying then turn the lights off and grow mushrooms which metaphorically I guess they are.

AI to replace 2.4 million jobs in the US by 2030, many fewer than other forms of automation

Good point

《What it lacks is the kind of experience that comes with having a body and living in reality.》

A good point. How does one fully define "pain" to a piece of software - for a human a bloody good whack will do it. :)

More seriously pain and more importantly its perception or experience is quite complicated. Ticklishness might be interesting - heaven only knows what these systems make of "tickle your fancy."

Humour in its many forms defeats a good many humans so I imagine a fairly bleak machine interpretation of "black humour" or even the notorious English dry humour which confounds more than a few septics.

The question of reality (which according to physicists ain't what it used to be :) is probably more of a challenge. We take a lot of the world we live in for granted but the whole humungous body of science is just our mere scratching at the surface of that world. I assume we exist at relative ease in such a complicated world partly because we are a product of it.

The bar graph in the article from top to bottom is pretty good rank ordering of least to most useful. Hard to imagine what use a plumber would have for AI - a 1/2" shifter is much more useful tool (can even re-adjust attitude.:)

Some of the categories are a mixed lot - I suspect we could do better with fewer architects but with more engineers.

Poets like most callings (vocations), are usually fairly safe from the hazard of making a decent living so the risk of being replaced by a machine is infinitesmal. A professional Vogon poet "does not compute."

Lawsuit claims Tesla corp data security is far less advanced than its cars

Re: Genuine Question

In AU we probably avoided this type of american general fuckedness when we said NO to the "Australia Card" back in the '80s (I think.) Its also illegal for your AU tax office (ATO) tax file number (TFN) to be used (recorded) in this manner.

Drivers licence numbers have been/are used in this manner which unfortunately in AU states where that number cannot be changed (WA) the same grief follows any of the many data breaches AU has endured. AU organisations implement "world best practice" in the crappiness of their data protection. (Transl. World = US, Best = superlat. Worse)

UK rejoins the EU's €100B Horizon sci-tech funding program

Norway or Nothing...

From the other side of the planet it looks like the UK has a whole lot of nothing. I am glad I am not a Brit. but thanks for all your refugee nurses, doctors etc fleeing your NHS train wreck.

If I were you lot I would start learning Norwegian “Jeg krysser fingrene for deg!” (No. It doesn't mean doing something obscene to Boris et al.)

NASA rockets draining its pockets as officials whisper: 'We can't afford this'

Meanwhile over in Ars Technica...

The same topic is being worked over (by mostly left pondians I suspect) under "Science." Some interesting and occasionally relevant history, some (rocket) science and plenty of peculiar politics and odder opinions.

Not being a rocket scientist I never understood why the Apollo rockets used hydrocarbon (~kero.) and liq. oxygen while the second stage used liq. oxygen and liq. hydrogen (or why the shuttle required solid fuel boosters) plus the practicalities of handling cryogenic liquids - all are a bit complicated which I guess is why its called rocket science. :)

I got the impression that US elected representatives aren't much brighter and are as self serving as those in the UK. I reckon I could sell them a project to (re)discover Cavorite (or even some version of a skyhook/geostationary orbital elevator except I think that was already funded decades ago. :)

The consensus seem to be that Musk will be reclining in his Martian bunker sipping a pina colada before NASA returns to the Moon.

Re: British Moonshot Rocket

Are those two side boosters solid fuel with dodgy O-rings? We can only hope. :)

India warns ecommerce 'basket sneaks' and 'confirm shamers' their days are numbered

Re: Over there

《It is a shame someone here is not looking into how UK supermarkets can justify the price of products being twice as much without a loyalty card as they are with.

If that is not a dark pattern to force people into accepting a loyalty card they could otherwise choose not to have, I don't know what is.》

Presume in the UK? If its like AU you can get one of these loyalty cards with an email address or a PO Box. So a getting a couple under various pseudonyms wouldn't be too difficult eg Bill Wagglestaff, Dot Noether etc if privacy were a concern.

I would pay cash in that case as I wouldn't be too sure that these sods don't link EFTPos/Credit card owners to their loyalty cards.

Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia

Re: Pick your poison

I was thinking that its probably not the greatest idea to piss off chappies from that part of the world unless you have a taste for polonium tea or a novachok chaser.

But then Musk has real form in not having the greatest ideas.

Still I guess he could be added to WS Gilbert's They'll None of Them be Missed

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Re: Easy win but challenging keep.

《Make it like jury duty. Select people at random and pop them into these roles for 6 months or a year at a time.》

I would make it 10 years with decent pay and support staff. Every two years the longest serving 20% retire and are replaced so you have continuity. Silly enough that it might work and is certainly statistically more representative than the current beauty pagents. As far as I can see even replacing the current UK government with the inmates of Bedlam would have to be a marked improvement.