Posts by Bebu

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.

Re: How is this man in charge of anything?

"I would. I'd like to see how he handles the duck."

Pray do elaborate...

Experts warn of steep increase in Java costs under changes to Oracle license regime

I wish I were there then :)

"every single Java instance was outside their licensing scheme"

I would have retained a mariechi band to escort the auditors from the building :)

BOFH and the case of the Zoom call that never was

Re: another vote in favour of windows that open

Another vote for defenestration!

The projector can follow to give him something to look forward to after he reaquaints himself the car park.

Reverse the order if the window wasn't of the opening persuasion.

Zoom here zoom there - the last few years has been like a (more) demented episode of Roger Ramjet (qv.)

Scientists conclude cats only have three personalities after YouTube clip binge

Re: Scientific method...

Has to be a contender for an "igNobel" prize.

I might get a citation or two by letitng pussyGPT loose on a collection of Attenborough's DVDs and submitting the output to a gullible or mercenary journal.

ChatGPT talks its way through Wharton MBA, medical exams

Re: Did it not occur to the team that named it ChatGPT...

Did it not occur to the team that named it ChatGPT...

...what it sounds like in French?

What? Cat pee or number 2s?

Douglad Adams must be laughing wherever he is. The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's genuine people personality equipped appliances are perilously close to avoidable reality.

Some hope though.

"The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as 'a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.'" (Encyclopedia Galactica.)

India uses emergency powers to order takedown of BBC documentary

Re: Just business

"So is Modi Paddington?"

Sticky paws and marmalade on his face?

Do all these autocratic ursines have sticky paws?

More seriously I had forgotton about these atrocities so I am grateful for the reminder.

The relationship between Paddo and Adani has attracted some notice in these parts (AU.)

Ukraine slides closer to NATO with buckets of experience fending off Moscow's cyberattacks

Re: Barbarossa

A little ironic that one of the casus belli that the invaders invoked was the presence of NAZI in UA. A case of being careful of what you wish for. Now if not your actual swastikaed NAZIs you are likely to be facing hardware of which any panzer unit from WW2 would be proud.

Am I alone in seeing a rough parallel between Britain and Empire facing the Axis alone when many USA isolationists acused Britain of provoking Germany, and some of the current apologists. Joe Kennedy was one such fool.

Churchill, I think, said "give us the tools..." ; the President of UA has invoked a similar sentiment.

I am now old enough too have lived through times that are for many are just history. The distortions and misrepresentions have driven me to distraction. "Stop telling me this nonsense. I was there!"

Dear Stupid, I write with news I did not check the content of the [Name] field before sending this letter

Telephone Pole Number

A few weeks ago a pole outside our residence demolished by a speeding car - the pole was splinters as I imagine was the car.

After the mess was cleared away the next morning, the two things left were two metal digits from the pole number that had been flung off the pole by the impact.

On the ground where they lay they formed the number 42 :) which I took to be rather auspicious.

Atlassian CEO's bonkers scheme to pipe electricity from Australia to Singapore collapses

CEOs Bonkers - most are in are in the billionaire lucresphere.

"he and Elon Musk famously worked together in 2017 to install a 150MW battery"

Hope Cannon-Brookes counted his fingers afterwards. :)

When I heard of this project I thought at least they don't have to convert AC to DC but I still wondered whether the power could be transferred to the coast with HV DC or only AC is practical. I recall giant mercury vapour rectifiers were used but I suppose its all semiconductors now and I imagine rather impressive.

I liked the giant battery idea to ship power to SG (and elsewhere.) Sort of an oil tanker for electicity. I imagine modular batteries the size of (very) large shipping containers that slot in and out of the carrier. I assume the ship itself would be battery powered. I can see returning flat batteries as a dead weight, along with the conversion efficiency and capital cost could render the idea uneconomic.

I have a vague idea which I might have encountered in There Gister, of charging a type of battery then draining and shipping/pipeline the electrolyte to a destination where a discharged battery is refilled with the electrolyte and the spent electrolyte returned. You could repurpose all the surplus oil tankers. :)

More practically, if you cannot export the electricity, I cannot see why industries like aluminium smelting couldn't be established near to the solar farm. Even desalinating seawater might be a profitable export in future as the world's reserves of fresh potable water are depleted.

Microsoft is checking everyone's bags for unsupported Office installs

MS Spyware

I was also thinking they might be fishing for openoffice/libreoffice installs as well. This would be for me a gross invasion of my privacy (if I used Windows.)

If it were discovered that 30% of Windows installs had libreoffice as the default office suite one could fairly easy see how MS marketing could sow FUD around security etc and that running office365 in their cloud is much safer.

If they were pinnochio their collective nose would be prodding them in their backside by now.

Twitter tweaks third-party app rules to ban third-party apps

Plummeting sperm whale?

Whole fiasco reminds me of Douglas Adams' plummeting sperm whale in his Hitchhikers Guide.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/198068-another-thing-that-got-forgotten-was-the-fact-that-against

"What’s this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round … ground!"

"And the rest, after a sudden wet thud, was silence."

"only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again."

Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss

Re: What a load of cobblers

"a party pooper and be branded as a non-participant"

Almost a definitition of sanity in thus world.

"Sorry. I won't have a piece of your crypto cake but don't let me stop you."

I definitely would politely decline cake proffered by Travaglia creations and probably move to another continent. :)

UK Online Safety law threatens Big Tech bosses with jail

Effective?

Can anyone see a US resident executive of a US based company which chose to comply with this UK legislation being extradited to the UK?

Founder of FreeDOS recounts the story so far, and the future

What is dead may never die

What is dead may never die - CthulhuDOS? :)

"And with strange aeons even death may die.”

Unix is dead. Long live Unix!

Re: About 15 years ago...

Irix was odd - shipped probably the most insecure configuration of any workstation Unix but had posix acls and posix capabilities at least by Irix 6.5. Based on comments in config files a version, Trusted Irix?, supported MAC.

Gcc couldn't generate the right function calling register usage for networking code - had to use the licensed mipspro compiler to build tcpwrappers amongst other stuff. Unless you could afford a license you had to be cheeky and wrap the compiler in a script that filtered out the licensing warnings so configure and make would work.

Near the end you really had to work overtime to secure these machines on the internet - I can recall host firewall ipfilter, tcpwrappers, replace rpcbind, replace naming service with resolver libraries built from isc bind, replace sendmail with postfix. And 3 ABIs (2 32bit and 1 64bit.)

Pretty ghastly really.

Ended up running netbsd or openbsd instead on an Octane that just ran a squid proxy.

The big Sony? crt monitors were eventually purloined by windows box owners. Never did decide whether Northern/Southern hemisphere monitor thing was real or some sgi techy having a lend.

One think I was grateful for was the libc support for zoneinfo files (unofficially) presumably snuck in by Olsen.

Because zonefiles are architecture independent (like terminfo) you could grab the binary zone files from another Unix and set TZ=:Australia/Sydney and done. No such luck with hpux-10.x

Time to study the classics: Vintage tech is the future of enterprise IT

Re: "Any enterprise worth its salt "

"Either it's just my old-fashioned "bottom up" approach, or maybe Computer Science is unique in being a subject best taught from the top down?"

I suspect this "uniqueness" of compsci is at best, wishful thinking.

Without some mental model of what is actually happening under the hood much modern technology might as well be magic (sorcery) and as (un)reliable.

Re: "If it's old, it's obsolete; and if it's obsolete, it needs to die."

"I would be worried about someone who speaks in all caps."

Even more so if on the other side of the Desert reruns of Columbo and tepid cups oversweetened milky tea await us.

Re: "...rewriting Active Directory in FORTH under VMS..."

"For those wishing to try, you may be interested in this little book on Object Oriented FORTH."

Dick Pountain ... a flashback to the old Byte magazine ... I am getting old.

I first saw a OO programming language for early Windows, (based on an OO forth), called Actor, in a Byte issue.

Too tied to Windows and hamstrung by Windows memory management to survive but was interesting for the time.

I think (Open)VMS is still kicking and is probably an example of author's contention. I have read that VMS was a pretty decent OS design and implementation even by today's standards. At the time I found Sun's keeping its corporate data on a vaxcluster amusing.

Just worked out how to add an icon. Went for Jimmy Edwards (Whack-O!)

Quickest way to save with Oracle? Get off Unlimited Licensing Agreements, says pundit

Re: Quickest way to save with Oracle?

I always wondered whether big red learnt some its tricks from big blue :)

I remember back in the early 90s we had 4 or 5 ibm aix workstation (rs6k) which only ran some sort of 3D modelling software (ibm license - one off payment) but required a rdbms backend (db2?) for which there was an annual maintenance license $4000-5000 (1990s dollars) per year. I was approached to see if postgres could replace the ibm rdbms which it appeared that it could as it only did simple sql queries and inserts (oracle would have done the job too - had site license then.)

Turned out that ibm held that not paying the rdbms license maintenance would revoke the application's license - so pretty much shafted. I don't know the ultimate outcome as I departed for different, but not greener, fields.

I suppose the workstations were eventually e-wasted and problem solved.

I guess when you sup with large american corporations you do need a very long spoon. Actually Lucifer might be preferable to Larry.

Did Larry get some of twitter or was the cheque postdated? ;)

Canadian owes bosses for 'time theft' after work-tracking app sinks tribunal bid

Re: Such monitoring does not account for efficiency

"In IT efficiency can have a 10:1 or more impact, by being able to script out things which others do manually with more mistakes."

Having a long deep think about any action that seem to be a good idea (at the time) before really stuffing up could pay unquantifiable dividends. Group think is a clear and present danger here - just because everyone is doing it doesn't mean it is a great idea for your situation. Sometimes restraint is the best policy.

I am certain corporate IT is littered with the expensive corpses of ill considered actions.

This sort of monitoring, and the policies that it reinforces, promotes hasty actions with unforeseen and possibly catastrophic consequences. The purchaser of twitter might have benefited from this advice. :)

This can’t be a real bomb threat: You've called a modem, not a phone

"Tiddly-Om Pom-Pom"

So Winnie the Pooh went on to become a data comms engineer? :)

Still a bit of a leg up from eastern philosophy.

Haiku beta 4: BeOS rebuild / almost ready for release / A thing of beauty

Re: Yeah, Baby

"...not even ed..."

careful what you wish for :)

Porting vim might be a stretch but I think as long as some sort of termcap/terminfo + curses support is available a classic vi could be ported from bsd or system v code.

Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name

Re: What of all the towns and cities named after Native American tribes?

I assumed Chris Ferguson was joking with

an ever-expanding pool of Vice Provost in Charge of the President’s Livery or Associate Dean of Toiletries

(https://quillette.com/2023/01/01/stuck-in-the-middle-of-academia/)

but I am so sure now. Although a good laugh.

Am I the only one who is thinking that the circus that is our world is very much in the hands of the clowns?

Second-hand and refurbished phone market takes flight amid inflation hike

Re: Bum

"That's the problem with new flagship phones, it's hard to get something less than 6inches ( oh err missus)"

Even second hand the smallest phone I can find in ~5 inches. My samsung core prime was 4.8" but just before the pandemic I smashed the screen and I went back to my Nokia Asha 300 which was small enough to sit in my trouser's coin pocket. When you needed a smartphone to use the covid check in app I had to get a cheap clunky android phone.

Since the demise of the check in requirement (~12 mo.) I have been using the Asha but I have only to 2024 before the 3G network is turned off here :(

I am paranoid enough to think that if phone vendors cannot get consumers to continually update their phones they render the phones obsolete by having the networks upgraded :)

I remember vaguely a "Corner Gas" episode (a Canadian sitcom) where the (male) characters went through cycles of purchasing ever smaller cellphones (this in the day of the "brick") until one of the female characters questioned the masculinity of the smaller phones. Different world then.

US Supremes deny Pegasus spyware maker's immunity claim

(1) Build a burner...

And don't get caught :)

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/03/19/modified-blackberrys-sold-to-drug-dealers-five-indicted/

These modified devices must have been pretty decent for TPTB to go after them.

I imagine a 4G LTE module/Hat and a RPi could build a reasonable end-to-end encrypted peer-to-peer voice app using a wireguard rendezvous like Tailscale's service.

Chinese researchers' claimed quantum encryption crack looks unlikely

Re: Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they.

Always nice to see Mandy Rice-Davies (mis)quoted :)

CES Worst in Show slams gummi gouging, money-wasting mugs, and other dubious kit

Re: Literally flushing your money down the toilet

"A device that tells you your toilet has piss in it :)" as far as I can see no one has ever been penalized for stating the bleeding bloody obvious. Clearly some can make a decent quid ot two out of doing so.

I wonder how said tool handles number twos? Or techicolor birdsong for that matter.

These days it seems more sanity is likely to be found inside your local loony bin than outside (or is that a retreat for the neurodiverse?)

Cops chase Tesla driver 'dozing' with Autopilot on

Stephen Fry

And a superb Jeeves alongside Hugh Laurie.

University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?

Re: I wonder what they do teach them at these schools?

The unattributed quote made me think of the grumpy old git in the first book of the Chronicles of Narnia :)

I think the Doctor also used the line in a Christmas special using much the same plot device.

I only read the Magician's Nephew a few years ago - 50+ years after the first book and ignoring Lewis' more mystical moments I was suprised how well the whole story hangs together.

One aspect of writing that I have always assumed, is that the better read author is often the better writer. This might be part of the problem - functional illiterates cannot be expected to produce coherent writing.

If I were marking assignments I might require the submissions to be handwriiten in lead pencil on lined paper. At least then they would have to manually copy their plagiaristic efforts.

Stolen info on 400m+ Twitter accounts seemingly up for sale

Re: "if they have access to his direct massages"

direct massages not a euphemism for extras then?

Crypto craziness craps out – and about time too

Re: Invalid comparison

"A paper $100 bill" - notes plastic in many places now eg AU so probably not worth even 50 cents but in any case last a lot longer especially if you don't try and iron them when you can quite literally watch your money shrink :)

BOFH and the office security access upgrade

Re: The spyware is golden

Maybe it's better if spying on people was left to the spies, excuse me, agents. - Yes you want your cockups done competently.

LastPass admits attackers have a copy of customers’ password vaults

Re: Someone Else's Password

can't put their phones down long enough to cross a road safely - this is a problem?

has no idea how any of these gadgets actually work - to be fair I am not sure anyone really does anymore. Reading a text on 4G/LTE I realized just how complex these systems are and modern CPUs are complicated enough to catch out even the clever as the list of spectre type vulnerabilities attests. Best we can hope for is that the user understands its not magic as against technology. From my youth I know how carburettors and (Kettering) ignition systems work although I haven't a clue about modern fuel injection and ignition systems I trust that similar functions are achieved in slightly different (better) ways.

Re: Someone Else's Password

Was your 50% R.E. of any use? I remember Bertie Wooster did find his scriptural knowldge prize of some use.

Tesla driver blames full-self-driving software for eight-car Thanksgiving Day pile up

Capable of driving a car as well as a human?

"Nothing this side of Star Trek is actually capable of driving a car as well as a human."

Not saying much - clearly humans are a bit rubbish too - what happened to the one car length per 10mph rule of thumb for a safe stopping distance? Even 1 car length per 20km would do - given brakes and tyres have improved since I learnt to drive although attention spans have deteriorated.

Actually I recall the Enterprise in a write-off bingle with a planet in one of the sillier movie sequels.

Elon Musk to step down as Twitter CEO: Help us pick his replacement

"Send in the clowns....

"Quick, send in the clowns

Don't bothеr, they're herе."

The list of candidates brought Sondheim's lyrics to mind.

That Scott Morrison was proposed as chief twit I think has merit as he or any of his motley crew would make the current CEO look good. "I don't think, I know."

Elon Musk starts poll with one question: Should I step down as head of Twitter?

Re: Elon meet Seppuku, practise and get it right

Auction the role of kaishakunin? The highest bidder would have to undertake not to jump the gun.

Re: Confused.com

Truly the Boris Johnson of the tech world.

Or a reincarnation of Bergholt Stuttley Johnson of whom the late UK PM is a faint shadow. https://wiki.lspace.org/Bergholt_Stuttley_Johnson

"famous the Disc over for a single-minded approach to his crafts that can best be described as 'demented'."

(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Discworld_characters#Bloody_Stupid_Johnson)

Re: Confused.com

self-proclaimed God Emperor of Mars a reference to Ming the Merciless tyrant of Mongo? I remember from the early 70s TV a serial with Flash and co. travel to Mars where they again encounter Ming. The b&w serial would have been made in the 30s or 40s for the cinema - I mostly recall the explosively flatulant spacecraft.

Re: Confused.com

Make that 9,052,134,922 ;) .... not that I even know how do twitter stuff - got off that roundabout with ytalk.

Qualcomm talks up RISC-V, roasts 'legacy architecture' amid war with Arm

Re: Wording

When did the word "legacy" apparently gain an entirely negative sense?

In AU Legacy is an organization the supports the dependents of veterans and has no such derogatory sense - the legacy here, I imagine, is that we are not forced to speak german or japanese, or more tellingly that we are free to do so if we wish.

In my younger days a legacy was the couple of bob granny left you in her will.

When we have corroded this word to meaninglessness* are we to speak of "heritage" architectures?

*Five seconds after my telling a student who was complaining that a text had too many long words, that "words with more than ten letters were meaningless" ... oops. But its a good rule - the silly sod couldn't get past the learned introduction amongst other erudite front matter and was never getting to the text itself - dealing with the monkey...

China reportedly bars export of homebrew Loongson chips to Russia – and everywhere else

client or customer ....

I recall about the tlme of the (winter) olympics an interviewed US official (Blinken?) said something along the lines of "China doesn't have friends (or perhaps allies)... you are either a client or a customer."

I thought that showed a bit more insight from a US official than the previous administration would have led me to expect.

Not a customer so logically Putin's Russia must be a client, if a unwelcome one.

What did Unix fans learn from the end of Unix workstations?

We were so poor...

support tens of thousands of users, in as little memory as a first-gen smartwatch

"But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'." We were so poor

Re: I'd quite like an X-term

I had 8 or 9 ncd xterminals to support in the late 90s-early 00s. Needed BOOTP and TFTP servers to boot, configure networking, font servers and grab any local client software (via nfs?) The server(s) were DEC Alphas DECOSF/1 3.2G then DECUNIX 4.0B I think.

The users could choose from a list of shared DEC, HPUX, SGI IRIX and IBM AIX machines. Given each had a different desktop environment I would say users were made of sterner stuff back then.

By the time the Unix boxes were supplanted by Linux x86_64 boxes the terminals had disappeared. x86 32 bit Linux (or Unix) was pretty useless in that scientific computing environment.

I still have the NCD cdrom that came with the last terminals squirelled away with irix, hpux, dec osf etc and sunos/solaris cdroms - the rs6000's aix software was on cartridge tape so never bothered.

Great days? Perhaps not - supporting six different architectures, 32 & 64 bits, big & little endian, diferent major versions on what, by today's standard, was quite peculiar hardware - challenging is probably an understatement.

Ironically with the plethora if Unix platforms, software was generally written far more portably than seems the case today. (Of course I mean open source.)

Twitter dismantles its Trust and Safety Council moments before meeting

Lacking Recognition?

And this guy was surprised that he was booed by thousands during a comedy gig on Sunday.

Booed? Only in America can an audience not recognize a clown when they see one.

VMware loses three top execs who owned growth products

"...why three of their senior leaders decided they could do better elsewhere."

Curious where this trio eventually wash up after their concerted jumping ship.