Posts by Bebu 2075 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2022
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.)
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.
《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.
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
《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.
《What is it with governments, national or local? How do they bollox it so often? This looked like the win was easy for Oracle but the challenge is to come up with the goods.》
One observation I would make is that the business processes of many public entities are often irrational verging on insane.
Rather than reforming or replacing those processes with some sort of rational standardized practice that can be accommodated with off the shelf software they embark on a futile attempt to remodel the software to reflect their dysfunctional processes.
I don't doubt in this case both parties were equally capable upbolloxers.
apolohiae Aettlememngs ainhke
I was wondering what colourful meanings might attach to this dialect vocabulary. I was imagining, however unlikely, "Aettlememngs" was a brummy word for poor exploited or abused women.
Likewise hazarded:
"Ainhke" - n. a puff piece lit. full of wind.
"Apolohaie" - vt. to insert where the sun doesn't shine.
The black android icon in the bottom right looks suspiciously very much like the top of a classic dalek.
With Musk a wannabe John Lumic, Google might be going the Davros route ;)
Of course both daleks and cybermen are cyborgs not androids which would be of small consolation to those being "exterminated" or "upgraded."
From what I understand of the ADL, Xitter's action against the ADL is like a PT boat attacking a Dreadnought or the Bismark but without the possibility of getting lucky.
Forget Gilligan's Island more like McHale's Navy.
I am surprised that Xittler hasn't yet managed to grievousy offend the Islamic world - a man most deserving his own personal fatwah.
I would have thought wordpad was pretty much "done" and pretty much in feature freeze for the last decade.
Since wordpad only reads the newer docx formats I would have thought a plugin architecture to convert whatever to wordpad's internal format (rtf?) would leave the wordpad executable itself alone?
Years ago I would use wordpad on my wife's win9x PC which had an attached printer to write a quick business (paper) letter. Notepad.exe and wordpad.exe seemed to be the only sane tools on a Windows PC (from the corp. that gave us edlin.com :). The dos shareware PCwrite even earlier was not too bad for the same use.
Don't forget Linux.... all these distro's ruled by 1 penguin! It's a monopoly I tell you!
Although it says its a benevolent penguin even if appointed for life. :)
Perhaps apocryphal but did hear that Linus once saw some really agro' penguins in a zoo and appointed the mascot... probably nastly little buggers when on the turps.
《analyzing each image uploaded to Twitter to determine whether it contains nudity,》
Analyzing images to detect pictures of unclothed humans presumably.
Would Botticelli's Nascita di Venere (The Birth of Venus) trigger the filter I wonder? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Birth_of_Venus_detail_-_Venus.jpg
Posting any image of a renaissance painting featuring putti would probably be flagged a child exploitation material.
I have to wonder what the "features" that must be exposed to trigger the nudity filter. Two whole nipples and a flash of pudenta? Seems a bit like strip poker.
The whole Xitty cesspit is probably best avoided.
- "I don't read the script. The script reads me.
- "Everybody knows you never go full retard. ...You went full retard, man. Never go full retard.
The whole shambles that constitute the crew of the UK ship of state have well and truly earned a good bynging. (pour encourager les autres)
The syntax and semantics of sudo's configuration file(s) are not always entirely clear or obvious. I suspect more unintended access arises from misconfiguration than from memory safetly issues.
Still (re)writing privileged code in a memory safe language has to be applauded. A garbage collected language (Go?) would be fine for something like sudo, I would imagine.
《asking me for random things one morning. Slightly baffled I produced each of the requested documents and items easily》
Random was his mistake. ;) He should have asked for sequential documents....
It is a curious that storing items over a desk with the least recently used or most irrelevant at the bottom of the pile seems to mirror how the human memory works. I suspect evolution selected the ability to retain "what" with "where" and "when."
In the early 90s I worked with a chap whose desk hadn't been cleared since he started (+20 years.) When I ask a question while he was telling me (then a PFY) about an old abandoned project to implement an enterprise wide DEC "virtual ethernet" he fished from near the bedrock of his desk top's stratigraphy the particular document answering my query. Shoulders of giants. ;) Unfortunately a single storey building so little opportunity to have been effectively instructed in the art of defenestration.
《My working theory is that some users haven't developed object permanence yet.》
So no chance of " formal operations" then?
Had a dog that was smarter.
I can see diskless Windows boxes (iSCSI with block level snapshots) might be attractive but probably cheaper to employ smarter monkeys.
Even if tin foil protected the brain from the various malign influences which disturbs these drongos the foil with which they would be wrapping their empty crania is almost certainly aluminium (Al) not tin (Sn.)
I would expect tin with atomic wt ~119 should stop more "harmful rays" than aluminium ~27. I should buy some tin futures ;)
Suggest they are at risk from contracting Alzheimers from the aluminium foil - although no great tragedy there as they would only be going from disturbed and deluded to demented ;)
《The PFY seems to have done quite a bit of field work, so I think his diploma came from a more reputable institution.》
Plenty of 'on the job' training in the noble and ancient art of defenestration.
The awarding institution wasn't a campervan in Hradčany Castle (Prague) car park?
《Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses have been designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. They follow the principle "what you don't know can't hurt you" and turn completely dark and opaque at the first sign of danger. This prevents you from seeing anything that might alarm you. This does, however, mean that you see absolutely nothing, including where you're going.》
Sounds a bit like the clever new Apple VR device. The Zaphod model?
《We primarily rely on patent, copyright, trade secret and trademark laws, trade secret protection and contractual protections ... to protect our IP rights.》
What? Secondarily on, or augmented with tactical nuclear weapons?
Not too far from saying "we have three unique features..."
I don't imagine she would have these problems hosting her content on arm-assembly.ru $5 or arm-assembly.su $26 (go figure) or arm-assembly.com.ru $3.44 (all available from nic.ru USD.)
I aways thought I wouldn't mind a DD or SU vanity domain - (eg sweeny.to.dd or tirami.su) but I suspect East Germany never had an internet presence.
There is a general consensus between educators and students that the use of ChatGPT in school work should be acknowledged, and that it will increase the competitiveness of students who are non-native English speakers.
If one were to replace the use of ChatGPT with cheating one would have pretty much the same logic.
Is this statement intended to apply to such students studying in English speaking nations or an implicit claim of the global supremacy of written English in communicating science, technology etc? If the latter I suspect the French might beg to differ. ☺
Also curious to which activities this increased competitiveness is intended to apply. College admission, assessment (examinations etc), employment? Or indeed how any of this finally relates to capability and competence.
Certainly interesting times in which we live, unfortunately.
Until now a creation arguably purely human.
I was trying to think of a decent humanities question to give ChatGPT a real workout :)
Something like "Compare and contrast an aspect of Shakespeare's depiction of the relationships portrayed in both 'Taming of the Shrew" and in 'As You Like It' relating your answer where possible to recent performances."
I suspect you would likely get a great deal more twaddle from human students than from the AI although I do not think it would be an easy question to answer but probably an interesting one.
I was labouring under the mistaken impression that ChatGPT etc incorporated theorem provers and some sort of reasoning system but the poor showing in mathematics probably means they are only elaborate neural networks or perceptrons on steroids.
《designing OSes specifically to run as guests under another OS》
I was thinking this is not so different from paravirtualization which was a pretty big part of x86_32 virtualization in the early days due to the limitations of the 32 bit architecture.
I vaguely recall vmware used to trap privileged/illegal instructions and patch the running code in the VM to make the equivalent paravirtualization syscall. Open source kernels could be recompiled to use the para. calls directly.
I have wondered how much of the went back to User Mode Linux (UML) which I had fiddled with at the time and thought insanely clever. :)
《it all depends how many things you have to sort.》
Indeed. Whether its worth sorting at all is eqivocal when a linear search may be faster in the worst case than the overhead of sorting. Also depends how often the benefit of having the data sorted is used - probably only once when booting.
If wanted a 100y+ "web presence" I would think more along the lines of a perpetual trust whose deeds would have the flexibility to adapt to changing technology - carving the "pages" on rock faces if things go truly pear shaped :)
Would certainly require a lot more than 38k USD to set up but that capital could be invested to provide income to maintain the presence. If the actual hosting and domain registration costs are ~500USD/year then I imagine by far the greatest expense would be for the administration of the trust.
I think the BOFH chronicles could be a deserving candidate to be entrusted to such an arrangement.
"My guess is that he said “Fuck” quietly under his breath"
The women today, odd or just assorted, would have likely rated the poor chap with more Fs and Cs etc than his delicate ears might be accustomed. Back then odd perhaps but "ladylike" probably yes resorting to such terrors as irony and sarcasm.
"Oooh, you are such a clever lad. You have really fixed it properly this time. I shouldn't think you will need to do that again."
"Microsoft is committed to improving the overall exam experience to ensure that everyone who wants to take a Microsoft Certification exam can do it without any barriers or hurdles and showcase your expertise for in demand job roles,"
Reading the above would pretty much convince me to keep flipping burgers. :)
Unix/Linux/Network administration verges on insanity at times but anything MS always seems like a scam and completely retarded.
The weakness in most of this "modern" approach is that you will only learn as much as is required to solve the immediate problem and hoping one day the gaps will be filled in. The idea of sitting down and reading (say) the O'Reilly "DNS and Bind" (Liu and Albitz) text for someone who is likely to need to manage some part of their DNS infrastructure, is completely foreign. By way of an example the W.Richard Steven's books for me have for decades been a gift that just keeps giving (and the poor sod died 24 years ago.)
《asylees
Really?? Is that the new word for asylum seekers now???》
en_EN acquired "asylum" from Latin and the genitive happens to be "asyli" so I wonder if asylee is short for <something> asyli in some some legal Latin term.
I concede not really likely on that side of the pond as they appear to have enough trouble with en_US and spontaneously decay into us_US but perhaps they lifted it from some Oxbridge civil servant on this side. :)
I imagine asylees in the UK would expect to soon be resident in Rwanda•~
《Roger the cabin boy
Eye, eye, Cap'n, I'll go and do it right now!》
Even as a kid watching the original cutout animation I suspected it wasn't just Cutthroat Jake that was up for a bit of "dirty pirat'n." I thought the Captain always had a certain sheep shagging leer and Tom the Cabin Boy, from his accent, was clearly the keen public school type...
'Programmers use "talk to the duck"'
Really? Explains a lot. Especially if the duck replies. :)
Have to wonder what fetish management talk to.
As for CEOs like this chap the mind boggles.
These days I have a nasty suspicion that if one were to critically analyse any enterprise in terms of what it is intended to achieve against what it actually delivers and what activity is involved for the latter as against what would rationally be required for the former one would find a complete dog's breakfast.
All mention of "culture" in these pronouncements I would guess have no scientific or rational basis - I doubt any anthropologist has ever been consulted.
《Critcal to brewing Lunar Lager》
With the lower gravity (1/6g) the bubbles should rise more slowly and thus, I suspect as the bubbles would linger longer around the nucleation centre, they will be larger (and fewer.) Will need a major investment in lunar beermaking technology to restore the same lager experience. ;)
Since ISRO has neatly dropped this scientific mission onto the lunar south pole I imagine they can fix any future lager problems. :)
Congratulation to ISRO and all involved.
Have to wonder whether big blue has run this up the flag pole to see who salutes?
If I recall correctly this was one of the Drop the Dead Donkey's Gus' favourite phrases. (Such equally inspiring utterances such as suggesting the aligning of your water fowl weren't apparently neccessary in his time. :)
《MS Teams has subtitles and it's hilariously bad. Zoom needs to implement this. It's a great way to make boring meetings more interesting.
For some unfathomable reason this reminded me of the ending of the '85 Terry Gillam movie "Brazil."
Quoting from the movie's wiki article:
'... this "happy ending" is a delusion: it is revealed that Sam is still strapped to the torture chair. Realising that Sam has descended into irrecoverable insanity, Jack and Mr Helpmann declare him a lost cause and leave the room. Sam remains in the chair, smiling and humming "Aquarela do Brasil" to himself.'
Until now I didn't know that Tom Stoppard was one of the writers.
《Musk's acting was good enough and they could sell the debt on to greater fools.》
Was it not that sort of acting that got Elizabeth Holmes her eleven year federal all expenses paid holiday?
If you are going to piss "greater fools" ill gotten gains up against the wall ensure they aren't from the real movers and shakers and especially those that have form with basement furnaces.
I recall a comment by Marcus J Ranum in the source code of smtp proxy (smap.c?) component of the TIS firewall toolkit (fwtk) concerning the standard (rfc822?) requiring the each line of the smtp dialogue to be terminated with CRLF.
His pithy comment above the code that accepted just a LF (or CR?) was to the effect "you can be right or you can work."
That was a very long time ago...
《Imagine getting so worked up about how other people format their emails. Some people clearly have very little to do.》
I imagine these "some people" have a great deal too much to do to have their time wasted by top posters etc.
Once the rationale behind these conventions is understood and adopted email becomes very efficient, in terms of *every* participant's time, means of communication. For many-to-many communication such as mailing lists like the LKML I can not imagine anything that could replace email.
The fact email exchanges are self documenting gazumps video recordings of the tedious unfocussed blithering that typically comprise exchanges utilizing video conferencing technologies. Fine for managers, sales staff and other unfocussed blitherers as it distracts them from more wreaking even more havoc upon the productive workforce.
I am guessing there were before the migration there were carefully separated backup and/or archive systems but unfortunately the front door was left open to Mr Cock-Up...
Technically I imagine you might hold that the data and backups were still there (just add decryption key) although about as useful as dehydrated water.
Some good will have come from this cock-up if those, who ought to have known better, now understand the backup you don't directly control and can test, and do test, is no backup at all.
《IBM's joke is therefore a triple zinger that will doubtless be taught in comedy schools for generations to come.》
Presumably added to the syllabus of Terry Pratchett's Discworld's "The Guild of Fools and Joculators and College of Clowns"
Pratchett would have the ranks of Foolery (Degrees of Cowning) as:
I was really surprised the automated thingy couldn't detect a large vehicle / trailer combination crossing ahead. So you would presumably be dogs' meat running upto a (railway) train on an uncontrolled level crossing. It would probably head for the flashing lights on a controlled crossing.
The X-Twitmeister's X-men appear to have created a computerized version of Don Quixote but with ambition greater than just spanish windmills. Cervantes' Don was a dangerous lunatic but clearly we are not free of those similarly afflicted.
Sadly I only seem to learn of these great pioneers from their obituaries. I suggest his words quoted from a 1986 interview are still applicable namely:
"... I got a good, solid liberal education. I believe it's really important to have a very solid foundation in mathematics, English, and the basic sciences.
"... If you really want to be successful, being acculturated to the rest of the society and then going into computers is a much more reasonable way to approach the problem.
Pretty much the opposite of our current sorry state.
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