Posts by Bebu

Singapore software maker says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

Re: This.....

"Cloud is a fools errand for many."

Aristophanes "Birds" ;) from which we have the phrase "cloud cuckoo land."

Unfortunately I suspect Bezos and co would be flattered to be identified with the Peisetaerus character.

Re: Why are these people in charge?

"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.

Tough luck, Brits: Binance suspends UK deposits and withdrawals

Re: Well certainly putting the "bin" in binance then

"Magic Beans"

Didn't Jack come down the beanstalk better off than when he went up?

Too long ago and too many other fairy stories since then :)

Never did understand why a giant would want to eat an Englishman - I would have thought a pretty bland viand.

Surely an Italian or Frenchman would be a tastier morsel?

Techie wiped a server, nobody noticed, so a customer kept paying for six months

Mr Backup (W.Curtis Preston)

Looks like there is still a lot of confusion between a backup and an archive.

Recommend Curtis' "Modern Data Protection" to clarify the distinction.

I still have my copies of "Backup and Recovery" and "Unix Backup and Recovery."

Re: Would have done otherwise

《"If you want to punish them, telling them to shove it is the way." That's unprofessional. Professionals get paid.》

I would have thought in this situation the opposite of professional (like ones wife) would be amateur, as one would love (<amare) to recommend shoving a sand coated cather up his dick and piss on his serfs with that.

--

As a precaution I always like to make an archive dump of decommissioned systems before wiping them.

Years later you can always bring them up on a virtual machine or emulator.

Even if the system used time limited, now expired licenses its pretty simple to convince a VM its living in the 1990s just to extract what is required. Sort of a technological necromancy ;)

eg The non expiring Solaris Sunpro compiler flexlm licenses seemed to expire in 2000 so was a matter of revisiting 1999 to build the gcc suite under Solaris 2.4 - don't ask.

The UK's bad encryption law can't withstand global contempt

Re: One rule for them, another for the rest of us.

"From this, we can see that the Tory party is a mess, and full of cretins, so it will be a case of just see how it plays out."

When Boris was in charge of whole shambles I thought, based on an analogy with the "F Troop" series it was a case of a second rate chief in charge of a tribe of third rate Indians. Although I suspect Capt Parmenter would still have an edge over Boris.

Anyway with Boris tasked with being Minister most likely to be blown to bits in UA it looks like the UK is left with the third raters.

Even a Corben labour government looks a better option even if you were up against his "Comité de salut public."

Thanks to generative AI, catching fraud science is going to be this much harder

"il est bon de tuer ... un Amiral pour encourager les autres."

"ability to create artist's impression images based on research abstracts"

How is that going to work? From the myriad abstracts from a great variety of disciplines that have been my misfortune to have read, there is normally very little data to feed such a monster. You need to possess a fairly high level of relevant domain specific knowledge to make any sense of any abstract.

Tp2's post looks to me like the artist's impression produced by said tool of the tool's promotional literature :)

[meta enough?]

Never understood why scientific fraud has never been treated like any other fraud ie jail time (not that white collar criminals get anywhere enough porridge in most jurisdictions.)

When you publish fraudulant results and receive financial (grants) and other (promotion, tenure) benefits it is to the detriment of your society, institution and coworkers. How is that different from a untruthful prospectus or forged financial reports? (vide Bernie Madoff.)

Perhaps as in Voltaire's words there is a need for few good Byngings.

(Might be a T H White coinage.)

China's semiconductor and IC imports have slumped. Why on Earth could that be?

Re: The Continental Blockade

I vaguely recall the Napoleonic blockade was a (indirect?) cause of the 1815 Corn Laws, that caused so much suffering amongst the agrarian poor, and which which William Cobbett railed against during his life. Given said laws weren't repealed until after his death (1838) that is a whole generation of misery which probably propelled many into the satanic mills of the industrial revolution. As well as a large number being awarded a one way trip to Botany Bay.

History casts a long shadow and I suspect much of what is wrong in the UK today can be traced back to this time.

From afar England looks totally fubar-ed and one would have to be a Faredge brexiteer not to admit some truth in that observation.

Catholic clergy surveillance org 'outs gay priests'

Doubt the provenance....

"Pope Francis suggested gay priests should be celibate or leave the church."

I am pretty sure a Jesuit such his Holiness would know the difference between celibacy and chastity.

I would think these quasi-religous KKK types would better apply their efforts to eradicating the kiddie fiddlers and other abusers from their Church. Perhaps a task for the (Spanish) Inquisition.

Brit newspaper giant fills space with AI-assisted articles

"News of the World" meets ChatGPT?

At least that anathema was avoided, thank God but I suspect even Lucifer's firm would steer clear of such an abomination.

Atlassian to dump 500 – by email – in the name of 'rebalancing'

Phone sanitizers?

《"Talent Acquisition, Program Management, and Research & Insights" teams will feel the deepest cuts.》

One might wonder whether the B-Ark is embarking its passengers.

Of course ultimately the remaining inhabitants of Golgafrincham perished from a disease contracted from infected phones.

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

update byline ;)

"Alexander Hanff is a *LIVING* computer scientist and leading privacy technologist who helped develop Europe's GDPR and ePrivacy rules. You can find him on (the not so healthy) Twitter here."

- The whole thing reminds me of a malicious gossip spreading twisted versions of the current on-dites as to cause the most harm. Perhaps re-christen this anathema "tismis."

- I wonder what it makes of semi fiction - I am thinking of titles like "Operators and Things."

Zoom and gloom: Vid-chat biz sheds 15 percent of staff – by email

Fireball XL5

Fireball XL5 - thats going back a bit :) I was actually young then and TV here was monochrome :(

(Recently seeing an episode from the later UFO series I could see how much the lack of colour affected the story such as it was. The wigs are straight out of our Sydney gay mardi gras parade or eurovision :)

I am guessing when enterprises start looking at individual productivity versus the use of social media like business communication tools they may start ditching both the tools and the individuals. Before zoom and its ilk meetings could be and were enormous wasters of time - the pandemic and zoom just put the whole charade on steroids. It was like an episode of "Roger Ramjet" (q.v.:) - Roger and his american eagles zooming here, zooming there causing mayhem. When I first saw one of these new electric monocycles I immediately thought of that series' "Solarbots." For me a unicycle pretty much implies the rider is a clown.

Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved

Re: Does this

An old Blackberry would probably be caught by this.

In AU they wouldn't work anyway as 2G is long gone, 3G goes in 2024. My small Nokia Asha 300 will soon be ewaste :(.

One simple hack would be dual booting phones - the hardware is up to it. Two roms (the dodgy one could be "volatile" as in thermite rom for those annoying law enforcement nuisances.)

An interesting option would be to run a hypervisor on the phone's hardware and run both a conforming and non-comporming version of Android, IOS etc on the phone.

Even with one OS a container technology like Docker could pull down an ad hoc "Signal" instance as required and would evaporate on completion.

I thought the UK had a clown for PM with Boris but it is quite clear they really have the full Ding-a-Ling Brothers three ring circus. I mean bloody turnips - there should be an eleventh circle of Dantes hell under satan's arse for such fools.

Re: I suppose we should be thankful for an actual UK story, but...

I was wondering about that. I assumed the obligate v. obliged has more legal (statutory) force in the UK.

Oblige to me has a certain voluntary or optional or conditional sense - sans noblesse sans oblige. Obligate < obligation would convey a stronger sense or complusion.

I would use require or mandate or compel etc instead.

A prior comment used a conditional like "If I'm a xxxx pornographer...." which omitting the "if" is pretty much admitting guilt. I for one would use the archaic subjunctive :) "If I were a xxxx pornographer" would not fly without the "if" but I suppose the self tasering plod would not notice.

The Scots must feel like the Canadians - if the Scots could dig a very deep trench along Hadrian's wall and attach a humungous outboard motor to their side, they would motor away to perhaps sunnier climes - just south of Tasmania might be suitable for the Caledonian temperament ;)

UK tax authority nudges net 'influencers': You may owe us for those OnlyFans feet pics

Re: I think you'll find...

"Or there's perhaps a more 'revolutionary' solution to that linguistic problem…"

Oui citoyen.

QC - some AU states use SC instead - Senior Counsel apparently.

I think OE had cyning and cwen - perhaps the linguists can construct the neuter case from either. Both start with C which might be a bit of a problem for QC/KCs becoming CCs :)

Gartner: Oracle probes orgs for Java compliance after new licensing terms

Re: Oracle is targeting users on Java compliance after new licensing terms

I stopped using VirtualBox on Linux some years ago when it starting causing problems with dkms with nvidia drivers.

I have used virt-manager (RHEL7/CentOS7) to spin up the odd OS image (BSD, OpenIndiana etc) and mostly works fine.

Its just kvm + qemu afaik.

Anything to avoid oracle skulduggery.

Even when java was sun I avoided it like the plague - anything coded in it was always suspect and for sysadmin applications usually had to run as root.

Once oracle bought sun even more reason to avoid. More like ebola than plague :)

Gen Z lingo and search engines: A Millennial Odyssey

"I wonder how old Jeeves handles this"

I would think the inimitable Jeeves might recommend consulting Sir Roderick Glossop who is

"...really a sort of janitor to the loony-bin. I mean to say, when your uncle the Duke begins to feel the strain a bit and you find him in the blue drawing-room sticking straws in his hair, old Glossop is the first person you send for. He toddles round, gives the patient the once-over, talks about overexcited nervous systems, and recommends complete rest and seclusion and all that sort of thing. Practically every posh family in the country has called him in at one time or another, and I suppose that, being in that position - I mean constantly having to sit on people’s heads while their nearest and dearest phone to the asylum to send round the wagon - does tend to make a chappie take what you might call a warped view of humanity."

The Inimitable Jeeves (1923)

PG Wodehouse

1923 a century later ... plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Virtual reality telemetry means you can virtually kiss goodbye to privacy

Rubber ducty?

"Boat. Leak. Duct tape. Again and again and again."

End up with a vessel made of duct tape - a demented, unseaworthy variation on the ship of Theseus.

As the first comment points out there is an alternate reality to VR in which it does rain. This should be comforting because if its not "actual reality" its more likely to be someone else's delusion unless you like raining on your own parade.

As an abstract problem I would have thought you could treat each VR participants as a peer to peer end point and encrypting all traffic between them and with whatever models the "world" receiving only the grossest minimal data (encrypted) to coordinate tthe finer detailed model performed on the end points.

Not a problem I will face.

I think I have some clouds to shout at.

99 year old man says cryptocurrency is for idiots

Looks aren't everything

'“I get my exercise being a pallbearer for those of my friends who believed in regular running and calisthenics.”--Sir Winston Churchill'

But didn't he look it though.

Not being a pom when I heard the phrase a "Churchill cod" I thought it was a reference to his physical appearance. :)

Hard to imagine his running around the veldt in his younger days.

I suppose he was also a semi-septic as an old Iranian friend put it.

Too much gold

"In fact, too much gold was the downfall of the Spanish empire. Gold, in fact, all "precious" minerals are part of a carefully managed markets that ensure supply is limited."

I thought it was silver but probably both. They certain "extracted" vast quantities of both from the long suffering natives and minus what El Draco relieved them of, that must have saturated Europe.

I'm not exactly popular with the ladies,

"I'm not exactly popular with the ladies"

I can imagine. :)

The better half works in jewellery and it is surprising just how many of the lads are buying and wearing jewellery and I am not talking alphabet people. I can understand the tradies buying a tungsten wedding band - it would survive anything short of a dip in Mt Doom - but I am talking diamond bling earrings.

I think I just might pop off and have a wee shout at clouds. :)

systemd 253: You're looking at the future of enterprise Linux boot processes

Pinocchio?

I was idly wondering what would one expect if one added ChatGPT to Systemd?

(The kitchen sink is already plumbed in I understand. :)

Pinocchio could be an appropriate name for the resulting anathema because, apart from the nose thing, I suspect it might start up asking "Are we Windows yet?"

The quest to make Linux bulletproof

Don't give up the day job

"git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space."

Yes apparently a joke

"https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/256450/are-git-branches-in-fact-homeomorphic-endofunctors-mapping-submanifolds-of-a"

and codswallop. The Haskell monad/monoid thing it parodies is apparently correct and humorous.

Comedy night in the maths dept must be a barrel of laughs.

Make Linux safer… or die trying

Re: The problem is desktop components on servers

"And even if it does, we'll just give him a good kicking..."

《Though you sometimes do get his disciples even after once.》

So you don't get the organ grinder the above remedy can be satisfactorily applied to the monkey.

Actually I don't particularly mind systemd - its a totally insane reproduction of some of the nearly forgotten migraines from Solaris - but the bits I use work well enough. Passing ambient capabilities (eg cap_net_bind_service) to processes when dropping privilege (saves fiddling with file system capabilities and permissions) and with chroot()ing and private /tmp makes a sysadmin's life a bit easier.

FMLI?

"Framed-Access Command Environment"

I had forgotten FMLI and all that SysV? stuff.

Most of the Unixes had text sysadmin user interfaces (tui) SAM in HPUX?, AIX etc. of various degrees of ghastliness. Not that more recent efforts are much better.

I recently created a VM of the latest OpenIndiana release just out morbid curiosity (or nostalgia :)

If I am absolutely honest it really is a better real world proposition for a solid coherent OS than most/all Linux distros and I would also say would still have an edge over the BSDs. Absolute heresy I know. Not any risk this side of doomsday of any Solaris derivative getting any traction given its ultimate ownership.

Re: @AC - Technology & Economics

"...we'll use comrades instead. Like in "the comrades running AWS or Google".

The people collective of AWS or Google? Pigs might fly. I think serf or slave of these respective fiefdoms would be closer to the truth.

I suspect I wouldn't be the first to imagine that the 13th ammendment (+14,15) didn't abolish just industrialized.

China's spy balloon barrage earns six of its companies a spot on US entity list

Re: AIM9-X

"They need a less destructive way of bursting the balloons."

They now have some pretty powerful lasers which I imagine could cut some small holes in the balloon and let it deflate (and descend) slowly.

Or just vaporize it deathstar style.

Have to be cheaper than a missile.

ChromeOS now runs on top of Linux and, er, Zephyr ...

Re: Google believes in building secure products

"Google...really hates the idea that someone might purchase a chrome book and put a different OS on it."

As an exercise I replaced ChromeOS on an obsolete intel chromebook with coreboot, Win10 and then Ubuntu but anything that annoys alphabet has to be a bonus.

Curiosity finds clearest evidence yet for water on Mars

Re: I've seen those marks before

"Those tracks were obviously left by Vogon construction machines."

Mars is still there so I suppose the Ice Warriors gave them a good seeing to. :)

Roses are red, algorithms are blue, here's a poem I made a machine write for you

Re: Love poem

Clever. It is (almost?) a Clerihew.

Thank you for adding to my vocabulary.

I would have thought if you were going to plagiarize a love poem you would raid the Bard's (Stratford not Alphabet) sonnets before accepting the tripe from AI offal out there. The are plenty of other Elizabethan poets in the same league. Although some of Donne's poety is a bit racey.

The inamorata will recognize quality if not the poet - if she be an Elizabethan scholar she will chuffed that you raided a treasury rather than Smithfield shambles.

Glasgow staff form UK's first Apple union after historic vote

Deep fried bannana with the lot.

I recall a small chicken chain in SE Qld/AU that had a tropical pack - 1 battered bannana, 1 battered pineaple ring, 1 battered slice of spam all deep fried with a quarter of deep fried chicken plus the obligatory larding of chips.

Only grateful that hadn't gone so far as deep fried mango or kiwi fruit.

The wasn't too bad - far better than the Colonel's dismal attempts at Chicken Maryland.

Re: re: Hey, Glaswegians, care to share...

Based on a "Glasgow kiss" the poor colonial would hazard "an bile yer heid" ~ and boil your head

(as the late Queen might have said but unlikely to ever have.)

Google's AI search bot Bard makes $120b error on day one

Sanity optional

"The level of incompetence is mind-bending..And not a single one of them felt the need to sanity-check the information??? Youn can't make this stuff up....."

Donald Trump meets Max Headroom.

This tech should be able to concoct absolute doozies of conspiracy theories. (As Hazel Burke might have put it.)

IBM health benefits blackout leaves retirees footing the bill

plus ça change, ...

Hah! The leopard does not change his shorts, my girl!”

― Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

Big Blue - not coincidently I suspect rhymes with sue and screw.

GitHub claims source code search engine is a game changer

Only 100Tb/25Tb?

I was surprised that github has only 25Tb of distinct code on it. I would have guessed in the 1000s of Tb (Pb). As the late Prof. Julius Sumner-Miller would have said "Who would have thunk it?"

I would have thought the structure of the data could make indexing/searching easier. eg Classifying documents into various categories such as C code, English text etc and preprocessing them separately.

C or any programming language has a grammatical structure with which an abstract representation (AST) can be constructed. Structure searches should then be possible eg "is this code fragment ~like~ any other in the repo?" I have a nasty suspicion that in general these types of (tree) searches are "hard."

A nice side effect would be picking up syntactically invalid code :)

Re: Why?

"You can guess what happened about 20 years later."

A nice little retirement earner :)

The Balthazar laptop: An all-European RISC-V Free Hardware computer

Re: Odd designs

As Michael W Lucas wrote in his book "Ed Mastery"

..."ed(1) is the standard Unix text editor. Dennis Ritchie, co-creator of Unix, declared it so"...

"A few are so lost as to devote themselves to turgid editors meant for mere users, such as vim and Emacs. This way lies not only appalling sysadmin skills, but an absence of moral fiber."

The non-manface edition has an mature BSD daemon on the cover - pity its not also a reg icon :(

China to stop certifying fax machines, ISDN and frame relay kit

Actually miss fax machines.

"I would not willingly give up my POTS land line. I don't want to downgrade to cellular for that."

In these parts (AU) even if you cannot get wired NBN the telcos eventually pull the plug on POTS and ADSL and force you onto fixed wireless (something 4G) but is generally cheaper and faster to go for mobile 4G/5G.

Recently having to scan and email a fair number of multipage documents, I found it involves a fair amount of fartarsing compared to just inserting the documents into a fax's hopper, entering the remote number and pushing the big button.

There has to be a market for the same user experience using the fax front end and some internetty thing on the backend. Perhaps an opportunity for the poor obsolete chinese fax manufacturers to repurpose their hardware.

I imagine it would look something like two faxes connected with a m2m service.

China reportedly producing quantum computers – good luck observing one

Re: Excerpt from the User's Guide

Qunatum is (mis)spelt the same way twice which is a bit suspect in itself.

制造商 = manufacturer apparently :)

I look forward to ChatGPT meeting chinglish :)

No, you cannot safely run a network operations center from a corridor

Re: Huh?

"...struck the door at exactly the right point for it to buckle inwards and break only our patch connection."

Talk about a shaggy dog story. Sounds like the "dog ate my homework" all grown up.

Perhaps at that time Mr Magoo was visiting Belgium.

No more free API access, says Twitter: You pay for that data

Re: Maybe he really doesn't care about the money at all

Curious why the saudis would invest in twitter. I wouldn't have thought it would be a big thing in their parts.

Perhaps they thought EM had the Midas touch? Although I suspect Auric Goldfinger would have made more of a fist of it.

I don't imagine EM will be keen to accept invites to any diplomatics missions of theirs - if it all goes pear shaped, twitter might not be the only thing that goes up the chimney.

OpenText completes Micro Focus buy, CEO says bye to 8% of workforce

Re: They bought MF for the Novell IP. LOL

Curious - what particular Novell IP?

Must admit Micro Focus was off my radar since the time they were marketing cobol and other compilers for msdos (and cp/m?)

If it were Netware they wanted I wish all joy to them. :)

I suppose it might be some directory server stuff or residual USL IP.

I would throw in System V streams with Netware gratis. :)

Best time to prepare to leave an Oracle ULA? The day after it starts, say licensing gurus

The Godfather?

"...are really priced by what Oracle wants to get out of the account, what they believe they can get out of the account. Usually it's seven figures plus."

Sounds more like a Corleone shakedown. "I make you an offer you can't refuse."

McDonald's pulls plug on Wi-Fi, starts playing classical music to soothe yobs

Re: Classical Music

"I can think of some classical music will have the opposite effect to that intended."

I was thinking for instant effect you cannot beat traditional chinese opera. Kabuki would be a close second unless the tongs or yakuza hang out in your venue - I would think the music would be the least of your problems.

Some of the atonal music from the early 20th century would probably work just as well.

If you were unashamedly trying to sell these macburgers then sitar music might fit the bill - it is quite pleasant at first but after 20 minutes it becomes quite irritating. Pachelbel's canon in D would too.

Seems like urban areas in the UK are becoming as unpleasant as those in the US. What the brits lack in guns they make up with knives. I guess same causes same effects.

Looks like today if Sherlock Holmes were to catch a train to some remoter part of England he might be better advised to saddle up shanks pony.

Sweating the assets: Techies hold onto PCs, phones for longer than ever

Re: Second hand kit is now stupidly powerful

Really true at least here (AU) picked up USD280 xeon workstation with nvidia card (3000 cuda cores), 32gb ecc ram + USD55 extra 32Gb. (Actually in AUD but converted for the reader.)

Apparently can run win10 - not that I would.

Only downside is the power bill if you were pushing the GPU cores.

Oracle cozies up to IBM, adds Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Better dead than red :)

I might be a cynical sod but I am certain anything these two companies do won't end up costing customers less.

I was looking at Redhat's "Simple Content Access" and equally cynically wonder whether this will expose their customers to Oracle style licensing roulette? Or the Javarization of downstream distros like Alma/Rocky/Springdale Linux ie if you have a Redhat subscription then these derivatives are also deemed to count towards total licenses required?

"Just Say No" :)

Boffins deploy machine learning in search for intelligent ET

Re: All it would take

"take me to your leader" - myself I would introduce the visitors to the Dali Lama.

Not a bad chap and would send Xi and co. in the middle kingdom incandescent.

Hopefully not visitors of "V" fame - I would not want the poor fellow eaten.

I would have thought the ML would need a training set to be able to detect intelligent. AFAIK there isn't any earthside

With a bit of luck they will only turn up a whole new collection of pulsars.

The wages of sin aren't that great if you're a developer choosing the dark side

Renumeration?

I am sure one would be "compensated" with a selection of Luna, Terra and FTX crypto rubbish.

If you can design/code malware I would guess the other side would pay better. Mandiant and their ilke always seem to be recruiting. Supping with different devil but diabolical nonetheless.

Musk: Tesla's doing great. I mean, have you seen my Twitter follower count?

Re: EV Smugmobiles

"One characteristic of electric cars is monstrous amounts of torque, with 100% availability all through the rev range (they don't have a torque curve they have a torque line), making electric cars ideal for towing."

I assume a hybrid would be not too far behind an EV?

I am guessing a hybrid is a conventional motor, a generator/alternator and battery powering an electric motor.

The picture of a 747 (now 53 years old) towing Clarkson caravan over the Atlantic is priceless and I imagine that more than few would pay double to have Clarkson inside it.