Posts by Bebu

Google says replacing C/C++ in firmware with Rust is easy

"C is the programming equivalent of the unguarded circular saw"

I rather like your comparision.

Mine is comparing C to an adze which I think is the only sharp manual wood working tool that you draw towards youself - so you can, like Odysseus*, build a boat ... or take your foot off^☆. ;)

I suppose a wheelwright's spokeshave or a cooper's draw knives are execeptions but I imagine to accidentally remove an extremity with one of these tools would require extraordinary, but not unprecedented, creativity.

_{* Odyssey book 5, Circe's Island. ☆ An exercise left to the reader.}

What do Uber drivers make of Waymo? 'We are cooked'

Karma

Uber et al normalized below minimum wage working conditions without rights or benefits, something that previous generations have fought for for decades right after the industrial revolution up until the 80s. It won't come back

It struck me that when the first world started exporting industrial production and later services to the developing world with its historically woeful living and employment conditions that the first world was also implicitly ultimately importing those same unacceptable conditions.

I wouldn't be the first nor the last to observe "what you do to others, you do to yourself."

_{Here endeth the lesson.}

Trump taps Musk to lead 'government efficiency' task force

All a question of spin...

if Trump and the Musketeers take control ...

of which way, clockwise or anticlockwise, the US goes down the gurgler...

traditionally counterclockwise in the Northern hemisphere but is as likely as cutting tomatoes blunts knives.

Re: It tracks

Musky as his Reichsführer.

Nasty. But the essential Musk as a failed neurotic chook farmer has historical resonance.

FTC urged to stop tech makers downgrading devices after you've bought them

Re: This might backfire on consumers

The problem I have with all this, is the unavailabilty of options of minimalistic self contained units with all their functions built in (hard coded.)

Even dumb digital TVs invariably had gratuitous DVD players which remained unused until the broadcasters changed their codecs and rendered the device ewaste.

A set top box, a HDMI monitor and PC speakers replacement worked well until the degradation in the broadcast content pulled the plug for me.

When reruns of Mrs Brown's Boys became the high point of the TV week as they would say on Craggy Island, I thought "feck this" and called full time on broadcast TV.

Am I the only the one who finds the hardest thing to do on the cleverest smart phone is to make a simple (voice) phone call using a remembered number. Clearly not really a phone, rather a miniature multimedia tablet with a (un)supported phone function.

Re: If it requires an app to function or control

a bassinet that requires an app and subscription

Rather perverse as the fundamental needs of your basic enfant haven't changed at all and even a wooden feed trough and some straw was sufficient in Bethlehem. :)

'Error' causes Alexa to endorse Kamala Harris, refuse to discuss Trump

Re: A specific political candidate?

Alexa, tell me more about American clowns.

- "All clowns hide behind the mask of the painted face (have two faces), definitely not funny and more than a little disturbing. American clowns in addition posses two tongues (bifid), are rather sinister if not downright evil and fatally infesting their nation's body politic."

The joke is on the US polloi but not much to laugh about I would have thought.

Re: Commie!

brain-dead" would imply there was a "live" brain at some point in time before

Anencephalic is probably the required word.

Monstrously Anencephalic Grotesquely Aberrant

Although Wiki quaintly states those afflicted with this condition "usually only lack a telencephalon." I don't know about the MAGA rabble but that omission would be a show stopper for me.

SQL king Larry Ellison becomes sequel sultan with controlling interest in Paramount Global

It's the future, Jim...

But not as we know it.

Atomic clocks are so last epoch, it's time someone nailed down the nuclear clock

Details...

I noticed the ribbons of time image used for this article have IV for 4 rather than the traditional IIII which is preferred I believe for asthetic reasons.

Fascinating stuff...

Nice article on the APS site Shedding Light on the Thorium-229 Nuclear Clock Isomer.

The extraordinary balance of the massive strong and electromagnetic forces which uniquely gives Thorium-229 a transition ~8eV reminds me of the Douglas Adams scripted The Pirate Planet Calufrax's Queen Xanxia held in near death stasis.

Quanta Magazine has a lot of rather curious background https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-first-nuclear-clock-will-test-if-fundamental-constants-change-20240904/ including Cold War vats of U-233 containing solutions.

13 days into the outage, will Kaseya's Traverse trip back to life today?

"they just put the clock on the round table" ...

but only noticed it wasn't wound up* until day 11.

_{* the clock not the company. Believe it or not clocks once used mechanical springs as their source of energy that were hand wound usually once per day. ;)}

Do look up! NASA unfurls massive shiny solar sail in orbit

I don't think you can tack in space ...

even if you could generate any significant aerodynamic force (~lift) as you don't have anywhere to put your keel. :)

I imagine you could angle your sail parallel to the solar wind and the motion of the sail relative to the wind would induce drag and slowly decelerate the sail in the direction normal to the wind which would, I think, away from a planet, slowly bring the sail closer to the sun. So you might be able to *very slowly* sail to Venus. Going outwards (downwind) just running before the (solar) wind might be the fastest. :)

The whole thing is probably more akin to gliding with the biggest thermal of all. ;)

Re: - unless they crack cryogenics as well

but we have not yet cracked cryonics (freezing warm-blooded creatures without killing them)

《Depends on what size you want your astronauts to be.》

Musk for Mars would be favourite but I not entirely certain about the "warm-blooded" though.

AI's thirst for water is alarming, but may solve itself

A Thought...

Cities use *a lot* of potable water *but* do return almost all of it in a "slightly used" form with additional elements.

I would think it poetic if this return product were diverted to be piped into these AI factories but then it wouldn't be my taking the piss or even, perhaps, my giving a shit.

Unfortunately The Vulture doesn't offer Space Karen's emoji as a forum icon.

If every PC is going to be an AI PC, they better be as good at all the things trad PCs can do

What else can one do with 40+ TOPS?

Once these tulips have withered and died, and AI PCs are offloaded to the recyclers these embarrassments might be good value for the likes of computer algebra, theorem proving, signal processing, image analysis, or photorealistic animation etc etc.

Of course removing Windows and any other Microsoft contamination from the hardware might pose an insurmountable obstacle.

WHO-backed meta-study finds no evidence that cellphone radiation causes brain cancer

I would wear a tin foil hat...

but I fear the Aluminium might give me Alzheimers. :)

(Or if it is actually tin (Sn), a nasty allegergic skin reaction.)

The main health hazard of mobile (cell) phones is mostly the calling party who is frequently a real danger to your own mental or financial health.

_{The usual tin foil hat wouldn't protect the hind brain or the mid brain including the cerebellum when you open your mouth, if I recall the neuroanatomy correctly from a course from 50+ years ago. Suiting from Cybus Industries' offerings might be more effective. :)}

Re: The car and the steak....

I don't understand the down votes. The second set of points (1-5) seem fairly uncontentious.

Point 2 "...pretend to eat..." indicates a depth of understanding of the human creature. :)

Point 3 Most these days are marginal vegos simply because of the cost of meat.

Point 5 Learnt the hard way forty odd years ago - an extremely unpleasant means of unwittingly committing suicide.

The global increase in the incidence of adenocarcinoma of the lung is almost certainly a consequence of degraded air quality which is, at least in part, due to increased motor vehicle emissions.

Re: From the article:

"Avoid water!"

Until the advent of clean reticulated water and Joseph Bazalgette's sewers, drinking the stuff was a often a poor life choice unless you were keen on dying from a cocktail of typhoid, cholera etc.

Beer or ale was usually a much safer choice. :)

Admins wonder if the cloud was such a good idea after all

"Why didn't anyone ask the admin*?"

From my own recollection the stampede towards the cloud, and outsourcing generally, rarely involved consulting the poor system administrators that would have to manage the ensuing fiasco. Fortunately (sic) that function was often also subsequently outsourced thereby compounding the felony.

Was frequently a C suite chap knew another chap who claimed his outfit was saving a motza by being in the cloud with the inevitable board diktat with unfortunate consequences.

_{* or indeed Evans.}

AI firms propose 'personhood credentials' … to fight AI

That would be nice...

If you educated your children in grammar, punctuation and spelling perhaps we'd be able to tell the difference between AI written nonsense and posts by Americans.

Unfortunately I suspect that horse bolted a few generations ago.

Just a glimmer of scepticism and a skerrick critical thinking might serve but that might well require the clarity of an internalized, precise, grammatical language. Plain common sense is, as ever, a bridge too far.

One thought: swearing is likely a fairly human activity and a coherent stream of profanity is potentially beyond the capacity of contemporary AI (and perhaps US religious fundamentalists*. :)

_{* failing on coherence generally. :)}

SAP CTO bows out over 'incident' at company shindig

Does German (language)

have the same pronoun thing that Anglosphere has to endure?

I vaguely recall Sie is already pretty overloaded.

I don't think all languages have separate pronouns or perhaps any, and Latin doesn't seem to often need those it has.

Using the preferred form of address within reason, is common courtesy but initially getting Miss wrong for Ms was rarely the cause for so much angst as pronoun confusion is today. Precious doesn't always mean valuable.

In any case I would be suspicious the corporate knives were already drawn before his (or preferred genitive pronoun) possibly minor transgression.

Spamouflage trolls pretend to be American patriots on X, TikTok ahead of US presidential election

The point was?

"to portray the US as a declining global power with weak leaders and a failing system of governance."

And it isn't?

What is this computing industry anyway? The dawning era of 32-bit micros

All about software

As I think was noted in part 1, the actual hardware became less important than the (application) software users wished to run.

Although some of the software that users want to use makes me think they deserve all the Windows shenanigans they have to endure. :)

Unfortunately the ultimate non starter in the 32 bit race was of Unix for the desktop - both the 386 and 68020 had ports of Unix although the advent of the 386 was instrumental to Linus' creation of Linux (arguably a Claytons' unix. ;)

Looking forward to the Itanic and amd64's ambush in part 4. :)

HPE to pursue $4B claim against estate of Mike Lynch over Autonomy acquisition

"cover themselves in glory"

Personally I prefer to flush that stuff.

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

Re: "...production of electrified vehicles appears to have backfired..."

without the black smoke like Onslow's car..

The village in the home counties with the alternate driveways exhibiting an Tesla EV keep to up appearances also brought to my mind Hyacinth Bucket Bouquet as it must yours with Daisy's spouse's vehicle.

Re: 95% Is Not Good Enough

if you hit it hard enough with the hammer.

Works for most things.

I recall a manual ed. teacher demonstrating nailing a screw with a hammer leaving around a 1/4 turn for the screw driver to complete. Appears rough as guts but did seem to work. :)

Brit teachers are getting AI sidekicks to help with marking and lesson plans

Re: This should be great for history

I look forward to the lessons about the Great Marmot Invasion of 1432 and glorious Queen Fuhgwahd, the first queen of Britain, who played such a crucial role in getting Wales to the Moon first and devolving Narnia's government.

Love it.

Narnian House of Commons with Aslan facing off against Jadis. Bit like Sir Keir v Suella. Standing orders forbid turning members into stone, presumably. ;)

And based on The Black Adder, Richard III was a competent but extremely unlucky military leader who probably had nothing to do with princes' deaths... oh that probably is (non-Tudor) history. :)

'Along with a picture of a strawberry.'

for me the fact that strawberry also has three Rs really says it all. You would think a blueberry, blackberry or gooseberry could be pressed into service or in desperation a cherry... obviously the model cannot grok Peano or count to three.

Spelling reformers like the decidedly peculiar G B Shaw might have wanted "rarsebery" or some such but I am not too sure that any self respecting LLM would want to be seen in company with that crowd. :)

Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

The linguists clearly having kittens...

and rightly so!

The study of natural language is really a very challenging discipline.

Perhaps an algorithm can capture the grammar (syntax) by analyzing a large corpus of (written v oral) material and possibly even distinguish dialectical variants. Even of this I am rather sceptical.

But I doubt that any foreseeable system is going to make much progress in the area of semantics. Correlation (between tokens) is not meaning.

Other areas of linguistics such as pragmatics are likely even more intractable.

Language is ultimately a game in which you really must have your skin, if it is ever going to be worth the candle. :)

A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again

When everything has gone to the hot place in a handcart...

A deep breath, the least repellent cup, mug, vase left unwashed in the tea room sink with hot black coffee (the buggers never replace the milk, and the 43 rat dropping brand really needs milk) and popping outside for a cancer stick with the ersatz coffee cooling gave one the chance to carefully consider the various options available.

I wonder whether over time the frequency of serious IT cock-ups is inversely related to the incidence of lung cancer?

After DNS it is almost always the power supply if you include wiring, leads, plugs, socket, demented UPSs and the very odd* gormless sparky. ;)

_{* as in rare. Lacking gorm in a sparky is longevity limiting.}

Microsoft hosts a security summit but no press, public allowed

Snake Oil Pedlars Convention

I imagine the usual suspects sitting around the table with each promising to keep mum about the failings of the others' products.

I cannot envisage that lot every actually raising and discussing the fundamental security issues confronting contemporary IT.

I am not sure than any attending would know what any of those issues might be let alone how they might be addressed and remedied.

More a manglement PR bun fight.

Need an icon of Diogenes in his barrel. ;)

Sweet 16 and making mistakes: More of the computing industry's biggest fails

Re: Honourable mention

Well, I mean, the PDP-11 led to C...

And that's the single greatest mistake in the history of computers.

Funny you should mention that.

The deciding consideration whether I purchased a PC or Amiga was whether I could get an inexpensive C compiler in AU for either (back then almost all software in AU was imported, markups were high and a 33% sales tax applied.) The compilers for tge Amiga were difficult to obtain (direct import) and expensive but I could get a copy of Walter Bright's Datalight C from a local vendor at a reasonable price (that included the runtime library sources) which sealed it for the PC (a clone with a NEC v20 CPU I think.)

Oddly the first compiler I purchased was a Modula-2 compiler (Dave Moore's FTL, [Čerenkov Software*]) which I used on work machines to build some tools.

Pretty much the history since - the software, no matter how crappy, dictates the systems and hardware that is acquired.

_{* a drole reference to their Faster Than Light (FTL) M2 compiler. A lot more physicists in the game back then.}

'Uncertainty' drives LinkedIn to migrate from CentOS to Azure Linux

"making it easy to deploy and admin"

From the LinkedIn blog post in addition to XFS they also used software raid but didn't specify what (LVM or MD) or why or for what purpose.

All up I am suspicious they were running a frankensystem built from bits of Centos7 and and an eclectic assortment of other components. Even transitioning to RHEL8 or RHEL9 might have been equally problematic.

Wasn't very clear at various points whether the blog was referring to virtual machines or user space containers (à la Docker) or or VMs hosting such containers.

Trying to manage a decade or so of Heath Robinson like lash-ups is never going to be easy to deploy or admin and definitely not on a new platform. ;)

Re: Microsoft's in-house Linux.

Time travelling energy supply? Taking energy from a future spectre with an excess of angular momentum? Well given that many companies are all about money now, stuff the future, your description is highly plausible.

Sounds like the Weeping Angels' MO.

Better watch MS carefully. If they come up with both time travel and infinite energy, their stock is going up.

Then definitely worth keeping an eye on. Actually... don't blink. :)

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

Pre-Cambrian explosion

The 8 bit era was like the pre-cambrian explosion of life... an unimaginable variety of systems and processors (680x, 8080, Z80, 6502, 2650...) with pretty much nothing interoperating - even CP/M systems had more incompatible floppy disk formats than icecream had flavours. Was still the age of soldering irons, wirewrap and S100 buses.

The TRS-80 didn't get a mention presumably because it was so successful likewise Apple's pre-mac systems. The TRS colour computer (like the Hitatchi Peach) sported a Motorola 6809 which was rather nice to program in assembler but not much use otherwise.

Australia's Applied Technology's MicroBee was an interesting Z80 design using static (cmos?) ram and programable character generation for graphics, The Bee was reasonably successful in AU but like most other vendors the arrival of 16 bit systems relegated them to history.

The next installment should be interesting with the M64k systems from Atari (ST), Commodore (Amiga) and of course Texas Instrument's TI-99/4 (which was a very early 16 bitter) against the IBM PC's rather dowdy 8088 design. The NS32016 wouldn't count as its was 32 bit with 16 bit ALU and also I don't think any consumer system ever shipped with it.

Zuckerberg says Biden administration pressured Meta to police COVID posts

How interesting...

I would have thought covid and vaccination would be rather passé by now.

Personally I am quite in favour of free Ivermectin and intravenous bleach for all those stupid enough to want to use them.

Looking at the photograph of Z heading this article it seems he might be morphing into a Harry Potteresque house elf like Dobby.

Perhaps someone should give him a sock*. ;)

_{* British idiom will easily suggest what he ought to do with it.}

Chinese broadband satellites may be Beijing's flying spying censors, think tank warns

"another firewall on top of that firewall?"

You have a satellite broadband system that comes down to the ground in China that then goes through the great firewall of China and they are proposing that they are going to add another firewall on top of that firewall?

I think the point was concerning other nations using the PRC satellite services as a common carrier.

eg The Kingdom of Ruritania contracts with PRC's starlink equivalent to provide access to their satellites for a Ruritanian controlled ground station which connects to the rest of internet (presumably via Europe) to provide internet access to the Ruritanian boondocks. No non-Ruritanian firewall should be involved.

The concern here I suspect is that the PRC effectively controlling the carrier service might covertly intercept traffic and filter or block content which conflicts with the PRC's interests.

The PRC in cahoots with the local autocrats in more dubious nations might implement a mini "great" firewall of Taboulistan to keep evils of the modern world from the innocent eyes of the poor Taboulis. Also the Tabouli firewall might well be embedded in the PRC internet.

I don't think I would be too worried these aspects but I might wonder whether constellations of low earth orbit satellites might be the perfect platform for electronic espionage and other skulduggery.

Microsoft Bing Copilot accuses reporter of crimes he covered

"a child molester, an escapee from a psychiatric institution, and a fraudster who preys on widows."

A rather versatile and busy chap. And a German court reporter ... don't think so...

A US politician or any associate of Jeffrey Epstein (the categories aren't mutually exclusive) ... very probably.

Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke

"usual black-and-white Gateway boxes"

The cow hide livery brings back memories. Gateway was a bit like the Dell of its day. Never actually had to deal with the hardware but it was ubiquitous in corporate environments (at least all those not actually all in IBM.)

I vaguely recall some of their components and plugs or sockets weren't exactly standard - power supplies? Always great for the cause of djinn liberation. ;)

Around the same time finance/procurement requiring the cheapest tender for two dozen latest and greatest Pentium 4 boxes - the ones with eye wateringly expensive rdram - with decent Adaptec SCSI controller and 10k rpm disks - what could go wrong? A lot but the killer was the optimistically rated power supplies that were just enough for the system to work for a random period - hours to weeks - before crashing.

A few hundred bucks saving on tens of thousands. Sadly the unreliability meant the cluster was abandoned by users long before the problem was diagnosed.

Chasing the AI dragon? Your IT might be circling the drain, IBM warns

Delusional

Basically the firm doesn't have the kit to do the "AI" the C-suite I thinks, without any real knowledge*, the organisation should be doing and even if it did, the already depleted pool of IT expertise has neither the time nor the actual skills (who has?) to utilize it.

So any sane IT type has packed his parachute and is attaching his static line ready to jump while wondering whether tulip farming might be a paying proposition. :)

_{* a chap one knows was saying the chaps in his outfit... the future don't y'know.}

Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor

Blast from the past

Look at the article's graphic is seems almost like looking at a Victorian book illustration.

The technician or engineer in (long) shirt sleeves, necktie and slacks with mandatory (drawing? r0toring?) pen in shirt pocket, short hair and side part. (I would guess a HP-65 calculator in its pouch also hangs off his belt. :)

The boss - suit, cufflinks and (old school) tie with dapper moustache looking rather like a sanitized Enoch Powell.

UK 1982 was more than a little bizarre but Thatcher presenting the Japanese PM with a ZX Spectrum has to be a standout.

letting it drop

I recall for the disk unit itself the recommendation was to drop the drive 1 metre onto a firm surface. I think these were 5¼" (133mm) full height SCSI drives built like brick shithouses or more genteely (or is that less?) a Soviet T34 tank so dropping one was more likely to damage the surface it landed on.

I went for a large screwdriver held by the shaft and the drive in the other hand and then the end of the handle sharply impacted against the drive roughly where the spindle might be.

In most cases it would have been mostly a case of "you can't kill that which is already dead" (Cthulhu excepted, perhaps.) The resurrection^* rate, albeit low, made it worth trying.

_{* disks not Lovecraftian deities.}

O'Reilly?

Whoever designed it must have been as thick as two short planks

Builder late in the employment of one Basil Fawlty, Torquay and possibly still encumbered with a garden gnome, property of that employer..

BOFH: Videoconferencing for special dummies

Manual Pages.

I find some man pages awful for that reason, the synopsis alone is too silly like "foo [options] [arguments]" but then you have to wade through prosy stuff to try to understand how to actually use the program.

Best read in the order SYNOPSIS, DESCRIPTION and then jump to EXAMPLES (and yes BUGS.)

Even then there are examples that are contenders in the race alongside Finnigan's Wake or War and Peace and Proust's effort for length and impenetrablity.

I recently had to consult lvcreate(8) for the first time in years for an option I don't normally use and my gast was well and truly flabbered and that isn't the worst offender by a long chalk.

Worth the price of admission:

"the wireless connectivity standards field has more cowboys in it than a line dancing event at a denim factory"

"Mac users who feel that they are being treated like second-class citizens – because they are second-class citizens"

"any idiot knows to turn the screen on – but on the other hand our idiots are special"

These gems colour in a lot of the circus clowns in the support comic book.

I was fortunate in having the boss who chose to tend the VC kit and the special people using it. Later the existing PFY was already all over the tech. So I probably know as much about VC as Simon's special people. Certainly never used VC of any description - a technology along with social media deserve a chapter each in my Le Livre du Temps Perdu. ;)

Re: So true to life

board rubber - I recall these were called (black)board dusters in our parts (Australasia) at least during the 1960-70s and were also used to reinforce pupil attention and discipline with great precision (or do I mean accuracy?)

Some teachers were specialists in high velocity chalk others the slightly slower dusty (shock and awe :)

Ex-Microsoft engineer resurrects PDP-11 from junkyard parts

Ex-Microsoft engineer

Probably wanted a system that no version of Windows could ever run on. ;)

The PDP-11 had a nice small instruction set which was ideal for students learning assembly and OS principles. The actual DEC hardware was pretty Soviet by comparison with today's kit as was every other vendor's.

I recall working out, on paper, how to build a PDP-11 processor from TTL components from the Fairchild catalogue first by hardware instruction decoding then considering using an Intel 4004 to interpret the 11's instructions and produce microcode to control the TTL and then pretty obviously an u-instruction pipeline / cache could be introduced or letting the compiler produce the u-code directly. :)

A few years later the Motorola 6809 which I could afford was not too dissimilar to an 11 (and with a separate D/I space supported 64k+64k) from which I learnt a great deal. The M68000 was even closer but not then affordable. :(

Top companies ground Microsoft Copilot over data governance concerns

Times in which We Live*

I think I can see part of the problem.

I think generally once AI/LLM has gobbled up your corporate data the model it produces loses any provenance of the information (and hallucinations) encoded that model.

So trying to restrict AI generated output based on the access controls that were present on the training data and the authorizations of the entity making the query would be nigh on impossible.

Creating separate models for each distinct authorization and correspondingly accessible data would potentially entail divergent output for the same query from entities with differing authorizations. Would make escalation rather "interesting" - not as though it wasn't already so.

_{* definitely becoming more kafkaesque with each passing day. :(}