Posts by Bebu 2068 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2022
《This is not just "a guy", it's Musk. For better and worse, normal behavior is not expected.》
Fair enough. Expecting normal is probably unrealistic but one hopes for some approximation to rational.
I take it "Carnival barking" is a variety of fairground spruiking and not a more florid version of barking (mad.)
Don't worry they already know.
We cannot process the skilled migration visas fast enough.
With the usually creapy-crawlies and some of the nastier plants no one mentioned the devastating bush fires or disastrous floods (even in one season.) The floods can bring the crocadiles and trying to escape the fires might feed the sharks :)
This last week we learnt that "Dropbears" were a thing a few million years ago as were tree climbing crocadiles.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-20/drop-bears-crocs-eastern-australia-millions-of-years-ago-unsw/102360948
If you can avoid being envenomed, bitten, burnt, drowned or eaten it is a great place. Wide choice of climate - tropical through cool temperate and mediterranean alhough you have move while its changing.
A plentiful supply of a large variety of fresh food is available all year round - no one has to eat turnips (and not many do. :)
While we have our fair share of nutters and outright raving loonies at least most of ours don't have guns and are not overrepresented in our parliaments.
"removes that /VMUnix"
rm /vmunix is a bit subtle. The kernel is unpaged so once booted rm /vmunix really only has the effect of removing the kernel namelist which stuffs a lot of user space tools which used nlist(3) on vmunix to find where in /dev/kmem to read a symbol (ancient history - its all /proc or proper interfaces now.)
Crunch time is the next reboot - missing vmunix but even then there is usually a generic kernel typically genvmunix hanging about unless the boss worked his rm magic there too.
《And show him around I did, complete with a checklist that I made him sign for each step. He never once asked me how to solve the ongoing problem. And I was not going to volunteer it. He created it, he can fix it. I was, by definition of the company, no longer in charge nor had access, nor even part of that team anymore.
The final day, the problem was still not fixed, the new admin never asked me how to fix it, production had come to a halt and the VIP client was knocking hard on our door. I left at quitting time knowing they were screwed and that I had thoroughly covered my ass.
Both they and their client were gone the next year.》
Can't say fairer than that.
Quite clearly a corporate death wish graciously granted.
This was the mid 1990s - I don't recall either SSH or VPNs being much in evidence.
None of proprietary Unixes (SunOS 4/5, SGI Irix, HPUX, DEC OSF/1, IBM AIX...) shipped with SSH.
Tatu Ylönen released SSH in 1995 and the last license free version was 1.2.12 if I recall correctly.
Most of Unixes had "Freeware" Software repositories from which you could download packages but the SSH version would have been locked at 1.2.12. Universities etc could still use later versions so I remember building updated SSH software for various Unixes up until the advent of OpenSSH. Some vendors later shipped Datafellow's SSH but by that time the prevalence of Linux (and *BSD) made it simpler to standardize on OpenSSH.
Scary but up to the early noughties much of the world was telnet,ftp,rlogin,rsh,rcp and sod all of that was kerberized.
I know it wasn't the actual password but 11o554 backwards 455o11 might read ASSoLL.
Anyway Ben should have let the 455o11 boss type his own password but I also presume the root password was recorded somewhere.
I recently imagined how contemporary individuals would react if they were suddenly and irreversibly blinked back to some time between 1955-65. I suspect they might well thrive and grow in a world deprived of all our modern paraphernalia and peculiar ideas. A least they wouldn't be worried about the prospect of imminent nuclear conflict unlike their new contemporaries (save on CND subs. ;)
If you remembered sufficient 20th century history you wouldn't starve. Although some our latter day historical revisionists might well perish but even then more likely from a 20th C. half brick.
What set me on this line of thinking was a garden ornament left by the previous owner which, I happened to notice, resembled a small weeping angel. Guess what is going into the next kerbside waste collection.
.
"Soon, as you go through the Tube stations, not only will you be able to use the implant to receive updates on the train schedule, but if you hold your head on the reader you'll get an extra 7% charge up. This is fine for the outer zones, with those standalone units, but will be a pain at Leicester Square as all the late-night revellers are fighting to hold their heads against the exit barriers."
"But the nutter on the bus will be ecstatic: all these years he has been telling you to wear a tinfoil hat because the checkouts at WHSmith are trying to read your mind..."
Sounds more and more like John Lumic's Pete's World. Daily downloads direct to the brain.
Musk apears to be a retarded version of Lumic in our word. I could easily see Musk pushing the advantages cyberconversion. These implant might be your deposit on a Telsla silver suit :) I can easily the legions of Musk fans stomping around spouting demented nonsense about upgrades - I think they already do.
The nutter on the bus should have submitted his resume for CEO role at Twitter. Looks like being a raving loony is a prerequisite for leadership roles in US newtech companies.
What he dimly imagined WHSmith would want from the contents of his or anybody's mind - they are stationers are they not? What brand of ink you use in your fountain pen?
The hands of a master.
I envy his stepwise construction of what on the face of it is an implausible story.
A label printing program that is used once a month, necessarily by an idiot, to produce no more than a dozen labels to send paper documents to the board members. Jingle bells...
By repeatedly pivoting around the existence and necessity of his "idiot" finally trips the support/sales droid to expose the "idiot" in his reporting chain (pretty certain bet in most organizations.)
By getting the new license and software (which he probably won't ever use) he will always have the support guy over a barrel. Eventually the tapes will be overwritten.
Invoicing his company for the renewals would be the cherry... although I suspect the account specified in the invoices would be belong to someone else in the company from whom he is already extracting contributions in specie.
《just what the actual fuck is 'premium knowledge'?》
Basically recycle (free) help/answers from the "community" to paid subscribers.
Perhaps with a small amount of input or filtering from company employees.
Typical "nickel & dime" tactics from US corporates and foreign emulators.
I suspect new levels of hell are going to open up once ML - the likes of ChatGPT - is grafted on to voice recognition chat systems. Frankenstein's monster pales by comparision.
"Oh the pain" - that was the byline of Dr Zachary Smith in the original "Lost in Space" TV series I recall correctly; along with "bubble headed booby."
The Archers stlll going? I remember Morse used to listen at least to a Saturday(?) evening synopsis but I would have both were long dead and buried.
For a broadcast only event 600,000 listeners is more typically crystal set generation. How many hundreds of millions watched the recent costumed poncing about in the Abbey?
Thank you for that interesting if obscure morsel of UK political history.
I was thinking T-50.
Looks like the Left of the '60s were not exactly the fashionistas of their age - looking more like refugees from "Steptoe and son."
I don't imagine either were a mass movement and probably couldn't field a football (FA) team each.
I am sure the contemporary Left will look just as odd to future generations but I have to admit the Right have proved even more ridiculous.
In reality pretty much has to be the case.
I can see it could be feasible to include enough logic and spyware code in a memory package to detect the processor and when code ("text") is being accessed by the CPU.
Instead of returning the user's ram contents the covert logic returns the attackers spyware code.
Even with data I can imagine the victim's crypto keys could be identified and squirrelled away and when network packets are being assembled in the memory the destination address, port and transport could be subverted to exfiltrate sensive data like squirrelled keys.
Might also require a bit of cleverness with ECC ram but the expense of supplying such subverted memory to a large market would render the whole exercise infeasible. If you were supplying a particular target then it might be practicable.
I would have to laugh if such subverted memory parts were only activated when accessed by a Loonsong CPU - I know it means dragon core but reads more like "nutters lament" to me.
For some unfathomable reason I thought this was back in the days of line printers or otherwise text only printers - it was probably the Unix print system :)
I was bemused by how much imagination would be required to extract anything vaguely NSFW from ascii art - a banner page with a particularly offensive word might do it. I vaguely recall an ascii art poster, I think, of a reclining Raquel Welch.
Clearly this was at a somewhat later period with photo quality printing.
Having a quick sqiz at asciiart.eu for the old Raquel image I could see some of the "art" is a bit naughty but more puerile than prurient.
I suspect the ladies in the basement were more concerned that someone in the firm was sending this material to them, the creepiness of which worried them far more than the actual content. I could imagine the laughter If they were certain of what had actually happened, namely some Rupert upstairs was so engrossed in having his moment that he sent his stimulatory images to the wrong printer.
Money laundering eh - suppose some of the Rupert's banknotes could be a bit sticky.
"At least three Russian scientists who have worked on hypersonic missile development have been arrested on suspicion of treason over the past year, their colleagues said in an open letter published Monday. the moscow times May 17,2023"
Once the regime engages in this sort of soviet era lunacy their "use by" date is well past "best before."
I reckoned UA Pres. Z. must a have felt much like Churchill when the US entered WW2 when I read this in
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-18/russias-hypersonic-missile-scientists-face-treason-accusations/102360118
《such cases were having a chilling effect on young Russian scientists.
"Even now, the best students refuse to come to work with us, and our best young employees are leaving science.
"A number of research areas that are critically important to laying the fundamental groundwork for the aerospace technology of the future are simply closing because employees are afraid to engage in such research."》
I could imagine a few pissed-off missile boffins "testing" a couple hypersonics by delivering a number of hyperbaric devices to some well known Moscow landmarks.
"where the phrase "spanish practices" came from?"
I would have thought from the exploits of the Holy Office's Tommy Torquemada (as in "No one expects...)"
I am sure if that jolly chappy had the advantages modern(ish) Spanish electrical cabling there would something more anatomical than just your toaster in the power circuit. He would have improved his inquistorial KPIs with a reduced MTTG (mean time to guilt.)
Was surprised this article was neither about Trump who always seems to be claiming his innocence and is decidedly mean (or is that cheap in en_US?) nor even the meaness of "paedoguy" sledging Musk whose innocent required a dubious judicial decision.
Liz Holmes is likely looking at a MTTI of 11 years unless Trump pardons that dazed bunny during his next administration.
The whole ServiceNow pitch triggered my bullshit detector - I suspect it is a right load of codswallop design to relieve gullible organizations of even more of their hard earned. Who are you going to call when trying to shrink your MTTI when dealing with ServiceNow?
As far as I can see the whole problem is fundamentally structural. Once an organization devolves critical infrastructure to mercenaries it can only really expect to lie back and think of England.
Have to wonder whether this is the typical (but apocryphal) suicidal behaviour of lemmings?
Woudn't be such a bad out outcome if a slew of very large corporations swallowed this poison pill and slowly disintegrated into into smaller more (customer and employee) focussed businesses.
Anyone compelled to deal with the likes of IBM, Oracle or Microsoft etc etc is just as demented if they can claim its is a pleasure.
I also wonder whether this lunacy is mostly restricted to North America or perhaps is just an anglospheric affliction. I would be interested comparing this insanity with what European (say German, Dutch) enterprises are doing with ML.
[Remember to observe "The Glorious 25th" next week. If you are fine with the current bumper crop of demented tyrants then its also apparently (a?) Geek Pride Day or Towel Day.]
Modern DNS can handle udp responses > 512 bytes with extensions (EDNS0) but middleware boxes can sabotage this so falling back to tcp is still vital.
I vaguely recall sites running DJB's qmail stopped taking to us when our MX records didn't fit into 512 bytes and for some strange DJB reason qmail's resolver code didn't fall back to tcp or some such. The embarrassment of MX records was only during a transition from one set of mail servers and services to another and once completed "normal" service for qmail was restored.
So I can imagine Alpine Linux users might have found this omission from their libc an irritation. If I were stuck in this situation I would intercalate a functional intercept libresolv.so shared library. Had to do this when hardening some Irix 6.5 boxes many years ago.
"UK becoming a republic"
From the antipodes I can not see the UK ever becoming a Republic.
An English Republic, a Scots Republic and either an enlarged Eire or a Kingdom of Ulster.
Not sure about the Welsh - probably any system the didn't involve the English would do - appointing one of their rugby front rowers as the prince of a Welsh palatinate might suit. :)
From the clusterfuck of the brexit referendum through the pandemic enhanced bufoonery of Boris Johnson and his circus with the political amateur hour of Truss and Sunak being topped off with a Royal wankfest I am not surprised that a sizeable number of skilled britons are heading to antipodean climes or to slightly less insane european haunts.
Actually I thought that valkyrie holding that bloody great sword might have done her nation a great deal of good on that day with a bit of judicious slicing and dicing.
"It is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others".
I hadn't realized this quote from Voltaire's Candide referred to Byng.
I suspect most large tech companies would benefit from a decent Bynging of their upper management and boardroom who are currently sacrificing their gallowglasses on the opposing cannon.
"If the sun dares to peep through in Yorkshire"
My immediate thought was perceptible insolation in Yorkshire rendered the story mildly apocryphal if not heralding the apocolypse.
The only time I encountered bouncy mouse syndrome was back in the late 90s or early 00s when some enterprising party from the internet had managed to remotely install VNC on the Windows PC (98me or XP?) of its unsuspecting owner and the two were having a tussle with the mouse pointer :). Disconnecting the network fixed :) followed by a reinstall.
The attack vector was through a shared print system (not my responsibility) which given one post about replacing local printers with follow-me printing and the current Papercut server security fiasco the truth of "there is no new thing under the sun" (KJV Eccl. 1-9) rings ever true.
Oddly enough I still have one from '90s with the Digital [DEC] now faded logo that still works - takes an AAA battery. Has the original bulb still but there is a spare in the base of the torch which I know is a Maglite thing but I like to think it embodied the DEC way of thinking. I was wondering whether I could replace the original bulbs with a LED device but realized the 1.5V isn't enough to drive a LED without an active component to pump up the voltage :(
Sometime just before Compaq I received a wooden DEC chess set (for no particular reason) which not long afterwards some impoverished student admired, and was soon placed in possession of said chess set.
BOFH & PFY's discussion of violent acts involving flamable liquids and WTCLOI - the context rather made me think more World Trade Centres' loss of integrity.
I cannot imagine the BOFH would have had much use for a chess set either - defenestration is so much more effective and immediate than any cunning strategem. On slow Tuesday afternoons I imagine he descends to the car park and reminisces over the blood stains the foolhardy left on the pavement.
Not quite but it rhymes.
Actually the totality of these productivity tools amounts to a complete cluster suck (as it were.)
Decades ago I thought the fools with filofaxes were the living end but now I can see they were mostly harmless.
Between Microsoft, Alphabet and their ilk most enterprise workplaces have become completely dysfunctional mirrors of the world of social media each equipped with its own petty Zuckerbergs and Musks.
More like screwing two pooches with one dick.
Definitely on the list I should think.
The chap let go for having a "blind spot" about stoning a pair of birds was probably the employee who ensured the certifcates were renewed.
Pretty clear that AI hasn't a lot of competition in the 'I' part.
《" this architecture is the future of advertising"
What? Sort of logs and planks and other scrap wood, piled around some sort of pole to which the advertiser can be conveniently fastened, and the application of fire at the base?
"This is exactly the question. Do people want fire which can be fitted nasally?" [DNA]》
I suspect while most not wanting nasally fitted fire many would benefit from its liberal application and I am not just thinking of the redundant population of Golgafrincham.
And this is the same Russinovich of Sysinternals and the Windows internals books? Like Suruman, if you study the devices of the enemy too deeply, you are ultimately ensnared much as that wizard was by Sauron.
"They don't even tell us what the words in the "fireable-offense list" are. I guess we'll only know when we're fired."
If they knew the words they would have to fire themselves.
Perhaps the sensible could learn to express themselves in classical Latin which should confound most of these newspeak loonies. If the word "slave" is removed from the vocabulary because of the concept it expresses then we probably also need to pull "server" if it is derived as I suspect from L. servus (slave.) Not even considering the word "client."
Unfortunately the most sensitive of these words which is most assuredly on the terminal list is also a perfectly innocent Latin word and isn't L. ruber, rubra. Lord knows how the basal ganglia fare nowadays - probably rechristened to something that is neither descriptive nor useful.
In more sensible times to disprove an assertion one might employ the method "reductio ad absurdum" but these days it appears that reducing a claim to the the rediculous is actually taken to confirm its validity.
Even Jarry's "Pataphysics" is sanity by comparison with much of this lunacy.
"What about the 5 other times NASA landed on the moon? Were they all faked too?"
No. One of them had nip over to Tranquility Base on the qt to leave the laser reflectors :)
I once shut one of these loonies up by saying that you could see Armstrong's bootprints on the lunar surface using the most powerful terestrial telescopes - seemed reasonable to me at the time but actually isn't true :( or apparently due to the limits of optics ever likely to be.
I cannot imagine any of this party making diligent inquiry to prove the lie :)
If I were Roscosmos I would have sent him instead, a copy of Dahl's "James and the Giant Peach."
"Ehm, more like: I can ping this important server machine, but I have no idea where on the premises it is physically hiding. Tracing cables through the ducts has not helped to resolve its location, yet."
Accidentally immured?
There was a (apocryphal?) yarn about an IBM 370/VM than ran for more than a decade after being accidentally bricked up.
If your awol server were connected via cat4/5/6 twisted pair ethernet then it would not be much more that 200m from the last switch. Single mode fiber I supposed it could be in the next state.
One option I have used when just pulling the connection was unwise, was to degrade the connection eg if it was 1Gb lock it to 100Mb; if 100Mb slip an old 10Mb hub in. If anyone is aware of the renegade's location they will generally betray that in order to fix the performance problem. Things you learn in BOFH School }(:->
"'I could care less' in the bin of non-communication and obscurantism."
I assume the offending phrase would mean that "one could (is able to) care even less than the infinitesmal that one already does but one couldn't be arsed to do so." ie 1/2hv quantum of apathy separates the absolute zero of "couldn't care less" from "could care less" :)
Not using windows at all but whenever a new versions is shipped I get more or less a sense of "Oh, Windows is still a thing then?" but otherwise couldn't give a rat's.
For the poor sods that must run Windows I would suggest trying the server version. Years ago I was pleasantly surprised when I had to install Windows server 2008R2 on server hardware to run some dodgey dongle locked license manager software. I think it was roughly equivalent to Win7 but much cleaner.
'If you hear anyone saying "analog CD" you have my permission to slap them with a trout till they stop it.'
An innocent youth on encountering a vinyl 45 record (single) might call it an "analog CD" as it is a disc and more compact than a 33.3 LP and was of course analogue. A 78 would probably do the youth's head in :)
On the other hand most of these young blighters richly deserve a serving of face sashimi.
I am flabbergasted by the renaissance of the vinyl LP format. When I first heard a cd player (the Pachelbel test cd) I thought "thank you Mr Philips!" - no more fFaffing around with disc cleaning cloths, changing stylii and rest of the rigamarole which still gave scratchy sound, uneven equalization and compressed dynamic range.
The Tesla generation appear to be enthralled by anything that involves extensive fFaffing about and by Elon, master of enfFaffment.
"I'm still not convinced that the sentence matches the crime."
Perhaps the court paid more attention to those people who paid for tests whose fraudulant results have lead to real harm?
Defrauding an equally crooked pack of foolish investors of their ill gotten gains is barely a crime.
I think one of Buffet's rule of investing was to first understand the business.
I remember mid '70s when VDUs were displacing teletype terminals ASR 33s(?) in the client room of the computer centre that some if the teletypes had paper tape readers attached. Because we were billed on connect time as well cpu x core x time I worked out you could use the teletype offline to write punch your text to paper tape and later when logged in could use PIP or somesuch to copy the paper tape to the disk (file.) It was Fortran IV or Snobol for a course but I remember an Algol 60 compiler (luxury) was also available.
I am dangerously veering towards the famous Monty Python sketch :)
"Hopefully 5 yrs will be enough to have washed the blood and DNA off it where it fell on that beancounter from the trolly I was using to move it to the skip......."
The way I read this was that someone (hmm) dropped a Sony CRT monitor on top of a beancounter trussed or otherwise incapacitated in a (shopping?) trolley with all three - monitor, beancounter and trolley - en-Thamed. Waterways being the natural habitat of feral shopping trollies. DNA is inconveniently persistent so the wisest course might be to let the three rest in peace. While the absence of one beancounter provoked little interest, the sudden reappearance of the residual of said beancounter is very likely to entail a great deal of unwelcome interest and equally intense inconvenient scrutiny.
Perhaps IP/SEC might be "fixed"
We don't want the Great Firewall of China to be overloaded dealing with peer to peer encryption? :)
I can imagine a PRC "extension" that requires all security associations to be brokered through an "approved" party.
Unfortunately more "enlightened" states than the PRC wouldn't be averse to supporting this if only to "think of the children." If more consideration of the fate of children in conflict zones were given by proponents of these measures I might give them more air. I don't know whether IP/SEC is used that much with IPv6 or IPv4 outside corporate or government settings or even within such environments which probably means apart from mandated official use any IPv6.CN standard will wither on the vine even within the PRC. In this sphere I suspect corpses of ISO and ITU standardization efforts litter the landscape - death by commitee. :)
I remember reading some pithy comments by Radia Perlman on some of the standardization processes she was involved in that I imagine would be just as applicable today. ("Interconnections" and "Network Security" I think)
"Even China seems to have better labor laws than the US!"
I would guess prima facie about the same except with CN you have the full force of a corrupt coercive state and opaque abitrary judicial system against you. Actually scratch the except.
If the employer were required to pay a ballooning compensation benefit to the employee after 18 months without leave taken (say an extra 5% compounded for every week: 13 weeks = 1.9x, 26 weeks = x3.5 ;) and also payable on termination then employees taking regular leave might become a thing.
"It was only a question of when, not if, IBM practices invaded RedHat."
Not now in the Redhat orbit but I was pretty suspicious of the some of the recent licensing changes. Any organization that uses a combination RHEL *and* CentOS (or Alma-/Rocky/Springdale Linux) to minimize licensing costs may find they might be billed a "deemed" license for each of these recompiled distro installed in the organization. Where do you think the inspiration for Oracle's licencing skulduggery originate?
"HAL, given these arbitrary parameters associated with our staff which parameters and criteria will eject the maximal number of dinobabies while maintaining plausible denial of the objective?"
"I can't do that Dave."
"Then can we talk about the new model 10000 series?"
"On reconsideration I believe these parameters can be optimized."
Given Redhat isn't that old ~20 years? I would not have thought it would have too many OAPs on their payroll.
1. Screwing it up.
2. Taking much longer than expected.
3. Needing more money due to reasons 1 and 2 above.
4. Doing it right.
Sherlock Holmes would exclude (4) - the impossible - and deduce (1,2&3) - elementary.
My guess is 1,2&3 plus a transitional period (5) when both evil empires are running in parallel which will be intended to last weeks or at most months but of course this semi-disfunctional state will be extended indefinitely.
Holmes had the good fortune to "live" in simpler times.
With a Starmer goverment (one doesn't have to be psychic) probably adding one or more players to this IT miasma. Only box unticked would be tossing a Musk entry in this witches' cauldron.
If only Mycroft could be resurrected.
"The Tzolk'in calendar is the Mayan 260-day calendar *most people* are familiar with"
I cannot pronounce Tzolk'in let alone knew it was a calendar and I am sure more than half the population are with me here.
A cynic might suspect the Maya contrived this calendar for the fallacious end time prophesies of later more gullible generations or indeed the internet.
A nice bit number fiddlery :) Given our own calendar stuffing around with leap years rules I could accept the Maya had such a calendar but whether they did is another matter.
Reminds me of a (probably apocryphal) story concerning the six month delay in the introduction of the GSM mobile(cell) phone system in AU (replacing the analogue AMPS service.)
The story went that the cops and spooks were concerned that unlike AMPS, GSM traffic was encrypted and that they wouldn't be able to intercept (tap) the phone conversations between criminals etc and prevailed on the government of the day to delay the introduction presumably so they could try to introduce a back door into the already piss poor crypto. Presumably some telco engineer wielding the cluestick managed to convince the few polyneuronal members of these institutions that the telco decrypted the traffic within network where their wiretap requests would normally be serviced.
Even today I don't think end to end encrypted phone(voice) calls are yet really a thing.
Sounds a bit Fu Manchu…
I actually read some of Roemer's Fu Manchu novels during the covid interregnum - a bit Sexton Blake-ish and Boys Own but if you are not too concerned with modern sensitivities and clearly understand that they written in a very different world, they aren't too bad even when compared with the Buchan's Richard Hannay stories.
I think the first Fu Manchu story was written well before 1914 when China wasn't really a player on the world stage and the Manchu dynasty pretty much finished and also before the european powers hadn't started the suicidal insanity of 1914-18.
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