Posts by Bebu 2068 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2022
"...sticky valve syndrome ... Doctor Zarkov's shiny rocket"
Thinking of this?
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/flashgordon/images/2/2f/101zarkovcontrols.jpg
Described elsewhere as a bullet with fins - not that a bullet benefits from having fins any more than an enterprise from having a musk :) The ship itself was propelled by continuous backfiring so perhaps the exhaust valve was faulty :)
I don't remember Zarkov in the 1930s serials being particularly mad doctorish although he would have been easily overshadowed by Ming. I would think that the emperor of Mongo would better suit Musk's ego.
"The government are using Palantir tech to track staff who went on strike."
Always struck me as ironic that Tolkien's palantír, which Sauron opportunistically used to infiltrate Minas Tirith and Isengard, is the name chosen by a firm arguably involved in similar skulduggery.
If I recall correctly it was some damn fool Took holding the Isengard palantír that put Sauron off his stroke :)
"listen to the stake holders"
Sage advice for a vampire confronted by an angry mob but being impaled also works for the rest of us ;)
Your take on it does make it sound like a script from some UK Whitehall satire.
Only recently discovered it was named after the fungal disease of plants - could be worse - smut or bunt. Iron oxide is a bit common so a rust fork might go upmarket with 'patina.'
I will be interested to see whether Rust and/or Go survive in the longer term - seems odd to think we might be writing code in C in the 2040s but stranger things are known.
I rather suspect that if the firmware source code were made available the flakiness of much of the hardware and lack of software quality in the firmware would be clearly evident.
I think the Intel ME had an embedded 32 bit Minix kernel but that was probably an outlier of quality. I understand AST wasn't too pleased.
Several years ago when I was trying to recover a colleague's data from a sata disk whose logic board had died I discovered the spinning rust's firmware is pretty much a mini OS (whose image is stored on part of the media that you thought you had bought) and of course a logic board transplant from an identical disk doesn't work because the media's firmware (mini OS) is effectively "node locked" to the logic board.
Heaven only knows what is running inside a ssd.
Interesting this nail is being hit on the head but as Leghorn Foghorn has said "...boy, I'm cutting but you ain't bleeding!"
Competent system administrators are hard to find and fewer are interested in entering the trade/profession.
When your services are in house the existence or competence of the system administration is either evident or assessible. In the cloud it pretty much has to be taken as an article of faith that your provider has engaged sufficient competent sysadmins to maintain the platforms your services run on.
After 30+ years I have to say Unix/Linux system administration is largely a thankless unprofitable career so I fully understand why potential recruits rapidly head in other directions. When ITSEC ceases to be sexy it will suffer the same fate. Management or coding are far more attractive to the polloi and largely more renumerative if mind numbingly vacuous or boring.
To be honest it was the other end of the animal that came mind.
Inescapable I suppose given the subject.
Was surprised at the el reg readers general antipathy to the BBC but I have to admit AU's ABC which is tax funded is becoming rather irritating by its one eyed peddling of issues with which I probably mostly agree. Still I prefer to hear all sides to any question up to but perhaps not including those posed by the raving lunatics in our midst.
I assume the story alluded to about the arrest or detention of a woman's golliwog collection is a beat up - the picture it conjured in my mind is pure Python.
Any loss of life is a tragedy for someone.
Apparently most murderers were known to their victims and I would guess motives boil down to sex and money (and possibly power.) So it would appear this might not be an exception - I would punt on the money side but this is SF so perhaps not.
Only in America it would be considered *normal* for (mass) homocides to be without discernible motive.
In our post covid times does anyone carry enough cash to be worth mugging? I suppose a crazed drug addict might not be that rational but most people living on the street aren't addicts just unfortunate and understandably desperate.
"why would you run the darn thing 16K times?"
At a guess
MAX_CONTRACTORS = USHRT_MAX / sizeof (unsigned) // 64k / 4
for 0 <= contractor < MAX_CONTRACTORS do
if infosource [contractor] != 0
collect from infosource [contractor] and send timesheet for contractor to HR etc
fi
resubmit job to cron !! thinking (if at all) "batch" command :(
od
resubmit job to cron !! give it more welly
When you don't have separate prod and dev environments I guess you have to be agile to avoid the brown stuff when it hits the fan.
"I'm wondering whether they'll make a quadruple next... Kelvin against Fahrenheit against Celsius against Rankine."
In the interest of the entente cordiale can add Reaumur for a quintuple (one at each point of a pentagram:)
0K ~ -218.5 Re (a less useful fact would be hard to imagine.)
Kelvin and Rankine are just Celsius and Fahrenheit, respectively, starting with a handicap.
VMS was a younger OS (1977) than Unix (early 1970s)
VMS was an engineered product for the then new VAX while Unix was more an ad hoc affair probably flying under the corporate radar of the time.
Interestingly an even older OS Multics had a very long life probably for the same reasons VMS has survived. VMS has been ported to three newer architectures while Multics was stuck on one (GE645.)
One observation I would make is that the cost of hardware that *could* run Unix or Unix-like OSes has always been orders of magnitude cheaper than which could run proprietary enterprise OSes. You could run a variety of real Unix versions on 386 PC eg System V/386 for a fraction the cost of microvax running VMS. My first personal "unix" was Minix running on a PC/AT followed by a version of Coherent.
The complaint about the inconsistent use of switch / command line options for the various Unix utilities is fair comment. When you consider these utilities were writen at different times, different locations by different people I am not sure we haven't done too badly ;) The beauty is that you can rewrite the whole menagerie including the shell in the language of your choice (even Rust:) implementing the command line convention(s) of your choice. Plan9 probably comes close but old habits die hard.
A blast from the past! I wonder how much of Benny Hill's material today would pass master.
His portrayal of a senior chinese official looking remarkably like Mao would probably send Peking incandescent today.
He must have ticked all today's -ism boxes. His character's "you got croff eals?" still sticks in my mind - the sketch would have been televised before Nixon's visit when mainland China would might as well have been another planet.
'what a “cup” is when measuring ingredients.'
In AU its standardized metric cup at 250ml. I think Elizabeth David in one of her books stated that it was 200ml in the UK but no mls in the US ;)
Apparently 1 Imperial cup = 10 fl. oz, (Imperial ) or 1 US cup = 8 fl. oz. (US)
The pre metric Canadian cup = 8 fl. oz. (Imperial) which is a tad over 200ml so ED might have been thinking of Canada.
The most sensible observation was that a cup was taken as 1/2 pint which explains the Imperial/US difference.
I don't recall whether it was ED or Constance Spry/Rosemary Hume that habitually refered to gills of liquid and sticks of butter which in pre internet times required a little sleuthing. 1 gill = 1/4 pint (1/2 cup - here we go again :), 1 stick is 1/2 cup of butter ( 8 oz. wt, about 100g.)
Fortunately cooking requires taste (both senses), discretion and a firkin of common sense especially when interpreting old recipes.
"...Twitler has been inviting Nazis..."
Bit slow, having seen "Twitler" just didn't get it was a Godwins Law more less until this context turned the lightbulb on. Reductio ad twitler.
I didn't realize space karen referred to the same superior individual and was apparently awarded because the clown couldn't read the instructions for a rapid antigen test kit. Tough on Karens but the ones in Burma are getting a lot worse.
Got this from the blue a few days ago. No idea why the account existed but vaguely recall having to create a microsoft account in order to install an early Win7 upgrade. More than 10 years ago I should think.
From: account-security-noreply@mail.msa.msidentity.com
Subject: Microsoft account security confirmation
Microsoft account Your account is closed
Dear xxxx@example.com, Your account xxxx@example.com, has been closed.
If you ever want to try again, you can create a new Microsoft account at any time. Just go to https://signup.live.com/signup to sign up.
Thanks,
The Microsoft account team
I am surprised there wasn't a length of bailing twine included :)
With a 3 kg payload and accurate autonomous navigation enough of these beasties could inflict serious damage.
The accurate navigation wasn't the V1's forte. (Or the V2's either.)
Australia has some form in producing cheap effective munitions - the Owen submachine gun.
If one of these things were dropping something nasty on top of my position I don't think I would care much if it were GPL or CC-0 licensed but I might if it came with an Oracle licence as I would prefer not to have to pay Larry for the privilege of being blown to bits.
"And if it could, it would still be traumatized about being downgraded from planet status. Of course it's bloody sad. We need to organise some counselling for it, maybe find it a support group."
Well it (got the correct pronoun?) could self identify as a planet and complain that it (?) is being harrassed or vilified by the the IAU by being identified as a dwarf (oops) planet or now a plutoid. Actually if one reads the wiki article this nonsense is actually real and mirrors the cognate nonsense in our societies.
Pluto was also Donald Duck's pet dog and lord of the underworld (Hades) too. If I were asking the latter I would probably not mention my 80 year father (stay under the radar.)
"It seems like lead poisoning by projectile (of several calibres) is a big problem in 'Merica."
The wikipedia entry for Lead_Poisoning under symptoms pretty much describes the state of US society.
Loss of teeth doesn't appear to be a major sign of lead poisoning but is possibly due overconsumption of well earned knuckle sandwiches.
《"The nation with the best teeth"
Maybe at one point. Certainly not now..》
Many years ago I read the reason was the use of corn syrup as a sweetener instead of cane or beet sugar. The assertion was corn syrup (fructose+glucose) was a lot less likely than sucrose (cane sugar) to cause dental caries. Never bothered to discover the truth of this but interestingly corn syrup has also been blamed for the rise of obesity in the US. Both probably a load of codswallop.
Personally I blame the internet and "The Simpsons" (thanks Tracey Ullman)... for everything.
The WW2 GIs, apart from their main fault of being over here, did appear to have far better teeth than the Tommies or colonials.
"Yes, I read that Ireland has the highest life expectancy in the EU, according to The Health in Ireland: Key Trends 2022 report by the Department of Health. Having a big fry up as soakage really helps."
I imagine a pint of Guiness could lift paint so atherosclerotic plaque would be a doddle. :)
I suspect those nations with a fairly broad easy going sense of humour fair better in these league tables. The hanging offense of the wokery is its singular lack of anything resembling a sense of humour--positively unhuman IMHO.
The Irish custom of having a wake with the guest of honour in the room would help normalize death. The comedian Dave Allen had a story incidentally involved the deceased being taken to the pub by his cronies one last time...
No great surprise then that the life expectancy of the denizens of the superpower is going backwards - a society of humorless death denyers (bugrit - deniers are for women's hosiery.)
I am surprised that no one mentioned peanuts and monkeys?
A few extra simians would pad out the UK circus. Not many primates would be interested given the last organ grinder is long gone.
The AU Publics Service (APS) has defined the problem but I suspect has assigned it to Ms Sweet Fanny to action
https://www.apsc.gov.au/initiatives-and-programs/workforce-information/aps-hierarchy-and-classification-review
Curious. Would the applicant need to be an Equity member?
"99.999 percent uptime were not designed to be turned off and turned on again."
So why have a power switch on the device at all? A well hidden reset button behind pin hole which accepts a mutilated paperclip would be more the job - not one of those brightly coloured plastic coated paperclips either. The designer should have the option of sending a couple of kV up an uninsulated paperclip. Nothing like a near death experience to focus concentration. I imagine in reality the device has a standard 3-pin plug and if its lucky plugged into UPS, if not the charwomen's wall socket.
Just worked out the five 9s is just over 5 minutes per year - just long enough to give the machine room a quick hoovering.
Naively I would have thought high availability devices would be designed to recover extremely rapidly and reliably.
MRDA.
Multicloud apparently means skint victims are pulling their services from the cloud (Azure) and running it on-prem/in house and in this case probably not on MS platforms.
DELL are flogging this as "cloud repatriation" but again Mandy gets a guernsey. (The UK government probably thinks cloud repatriation means sending to Rwanda any naughty foreign nuages that have the temerity to cross la Manche.)
Any sceptical senior IT executives who emulated "The Gondoliers"' Duke of Plaza Toro are now leading this cost driven retreat or at least experincing a mite of Schadenfreude the returning defeated legions.
"what's the collective noun for boffins?"
"Hand" like bananas? Not implying nuffin, no...
Boffin is peculiarly English so an eccentric collective noun would be appropriate.
The only reason I would have thought the Twitmaster would have signed up to this, is that he has realized he had liquidated all of his ML development teams, presumably for not being sufficiently "hard core."
"I think he had that the wrong way around."
As far as I can see he is a complete retard which doesn't say much about the intellect and acumen of those who were throwing billions of dollars at the fool. In a Forrest Gumpish way bribing the CCP might have worked :)
If he is facing 150 years then he quite clearly lost the wrong people's lucre. Normally a white collar criminal who has pissed the hard earned of the polloi, up against the wall, gets little more than a slap on the wrist.
Cryptovillain? Is it the villainy that is hidden? Bernie Madoff would be a Securitivillain or Ponzivillain but he definitely a lost a lot of the wrong people's cash.
The villainous duo could share the same cell for the next 130 years.
"This is Birmingham, UK, not Bumfuck Corner, New Guinea."
At least in Moresby plenty of fresh fruit and vege in the market around BF Corner although turnips are likely to be in short supply unfortunately.
I suspect the 4G/LTE coverage on said corner is pretty reasonable - Huawei was touting its 5G but Telstra's aquisition of one the regions carriers killed that off.
I was puzzled and amused by PNG being dragged into this. Do Brummies have "peculiar" dreams involving locations in PNG and the activities of the locals?
Public libraries already lend for two weeks, drm protected electronic books that can be returned early.
What is different with IA? Is it that copyright owners separately licenses this specific use to libraries completely bypassing the analogous first use argument? I am not sure the first use principle exists in the British copyright derived legislation.
For older titles I cannot see where the money is. I don't imagine Penguin makes a fortune from its paper sales of Capek's War with the Newts or Dorothy L Sayers' translation of Dante's Comedia Divina (perhaps a few quid from Peter Wimsey :) let alone from ebook sales.
https://cdn.mobilesyrup.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Reaper-Musk.jpg
More dim than grim.
The technology could eventually benefit those with spinal chord injuries or neuromuscular disorders but anything involving Musk has to be heading in the Cyberman/Dalek direction.
Perhaps if he does insert a chip into his brain the US courts might hold that he ceased to be a natural person and can no longer be a director of an incorporated entity. Those courts are typically nuttier than he so there is hope.
"I knew a guy who had an implanted defibrillator due to congestive heart failure. Towards the end of his life, his heart was weak enough that the defib would sporadically fail to detect a proper heartbeat, and would decide it was time to give him a shock. He didn't care for that very much. IIRC, the worst part was, he could hear it charging up to deliver the shock (apparently it sounded like the flash on a film camera from the 1980s). The second worst part was that the defib app on his cellphone showed him how many more charges were left in the battery."
Apologies. This really tickled my funny bone - very much English black humour.
Really reads like something Terry Pratchett might have dreamed up for one of his less fortunate characters - not CMOT Dibbler - he would have some Balderickesque scheme to try to make a quid from it.
"With his sense of humor, he would have appreciated the idea of intentionally giving such a device to someone you disliked."
I think a chap that Sir Terry would have liked.
Didn't Captain Nemo has a base in an extinct volcano's caldera? (Perhaps that was only in a 1960s movie version.)
I imagine Nemo would had been a foundation member of Greenpeace if nobody was.
Anyway volcanoes extinct or otherwise as the lairs of supervillains or evil geniuses is very last century. I should think a contemporary, status conscious, supervillain aspires to an orbiting space lair or a sprawling sublunar base on the far side.
Its so hard to keep up with Bezoses if you have plonked your wad on annexing Twiterie to your dismal empire.
The irony is that most the Bond villains from SPECTRE were far more credible characters than most of these clowns. Even KAOS and THRUSH had smarter villains.
"Must be really embarassing needing to use somone else's tool to get yours up."
Nearly pissed myself :))))
The picture of Bezos and Musk duelling with their respective pork swords in order to get more thrust, as it were, was worthy of the best of "Drop the Dead Donkey."
Perhaps this dynamic duo might be in the market for some recycled soviet era five year plans ;)
Replace tractors with cpus or gpus and apply coat of marketing varnish good to go.
For a few extra dollars I will throw in a Great Leap Forward - always a crowd pleaser.
The leopard never really changes his shorts.
"Every company has the useless twats in every department."
True enough but up until now whole departments composed entirely of useless twats have evolved within organisations that really should have known better.
As enterprises so encumbered face new economic realities a good many of these albatrosses will be tossed overboard in their entirety.
"There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth....and you yourselves thrust out." KJV
"long list of technologies the candidate would need 3+ years of experience using in a corporate environment, and ended with "this position will suit a new graduate looking to get a start in the IT world".
We seek a convicing liar - was Theranos looking to replace Ms Holmes who I understand is taking an enforced sabbatical?
"blast shield needs to be added to the equipment list."
Inside a fume cabinet.
I think it could be quite possible to pack an indecent quantity of a truly lethal gas inside a usb stick.
I was under the impression from last century's terrorism that C4/Semtex was pretty much undetectable or at least unsniffable.
"hidden telnet service functionality"
Combine clear text telnet protocol with security through obscurity - says it all.
Apologies if its kerberized telnet but I think unassisted porcine aviation more likely.
Just from the story it sounds like you actually have to construct an ethernet frame with the br-lan mac address as the ethernet destination and inside that the ip/tcp/telnet packet in which case I think you would need to be on the same subnet or ethernet segment.
When the attacker is aready within your walls and you have retreated to your donjon who owns the gatehouses probably the least of your concerns :)
Security Theatre should have its own awards categories. We could start with Premio Ubu - unfortunately not named after Alfred Jarry's Ubu character but would have been singularly appropriate for my proposed award categories.
There is a history of similar sort of nonsense with PRC warships directing high powered lasers at Australian surveillance aircraft (and I think an NZ aircraft too.)
Not too difficult to join the dots between the recent AUKUS submarine arrangments and this foolishness.
I am not too impressed with the deal either - I figure in for a penny, in for a pound AU need to either go the full monty or forget it - a bit of a bugger for non-proliferation.
"You don't make such inquiries in the City. They seemed like decent chaps. Decent chaps don't check up on decent chaps to see if they're behaving like decent chaps."
More from the same source - we would be grateful today if Jim Hacker and Sir Humpty were running the country.
"Just the one. [rule]
If you're incompetent, you have to be honest.
If you're crooked, you have to be clever.
If you're honest and make a pig's breakfast of things, chaps help you out.
- If you're crooked? - With good profits, chaps don't ask questions"
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=yes-prime-minister-1986&episode=s02e04
"that he designed the C language."
Not everyone might be as proud of that :)
Personally I love the language especially once the C89 was standardized.
I think of C as a very sharp tool like an adze - you can, like Odysseus, build a boat or more easily take your foot off.
Wonder why he doesn't run Plan9 on his Pi?
Remarkable piece of hardware. I was given a 2b (return for a favour) which I mounted in a small plastic food container with holes cut for the hdmi, mouse and keyboard cables. Out of curiosity I plugged the usb cable for the Pi's power supply into the usb port of the old TV I intended to use for the display - I was suprised that there was enough grunt for the Pi to boot which then extremely quickly reached multi-user. Makes a nice self contained Linux PC - had to use a usb wifi dongle if I couldn't use ethernet.
"Well played, sir."
I imagine in the most of north america apart from anglophiles, the subcontinental diaspora and some peculiar sorts in Boston the sound of leather on willow would only invoke an idea of some a private perversion.
To be honest looking looking at test cricket objectively I am not sure they are wrong about perversion if not the private.
Douglas Adams used the game satirically in one of his stories but I suspect he was also a tragic.
"An architect that didn't read to the end of the spec... I've never seen one of those before!"
Terry Pratchett had Bergholt Stuttley Johnson aka Bloody Stupid, who probably never read the beginning of a spec either :)
Architects of the Grand Design persuasion would be sufficiently educated not to "architect" anything - they might design and possibly design a hideous monstrosity but they certainly leave the "architecting" to their lesser bretheren in more dismal disciplines.
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