Posts by munnoch

South Korean web giant Naver creates its own Linux distro

That wouldn't work with the cool logo....

You're so bad at recycling, this biz built an AI to handle it for you

"manual labor for sortation"

Whats wrong with "sorting". I'm going to write a sortation function at work next week....

Sounds like the perfect task for ML, it is just a massive classification engine after all.

Garbage in, garbage out.... literally.

BOFH: Groundbreaking discovery or patently obvious trolling?

Re: Well, things are looking up!

Yup, we gathered round the TV at a mate's house to watch it live (remember doing that?) and I nearly burst something I laughed so hard for the next 30 mins.

A classic amongst classics.

Huawei handed 2,596,148,429,267,413,
814,265,248,164,610,048 IPv6 addresses

Re: Good for Huawei

My assumption is that the People's Party wants all devices regardless of which side of a gateway they lie on to be accessible and open to surveillance hence the hard-on for v6.

Broadcom loses another big VMware customer: UK fintech cloud Beeks Group, and most of its 20,000 VMs

My approach has always been to wrap proprietary API's in an abstraction layer to keep them at arm's length. Its rare for a vendor to offer something that is so truly unique that there is no possibility of there ever being an alternative for it. When the time comes its much more straightforward to swap over to another implementation without having to track down and rewrite great swathes of your code base.

You'd think this would be the standard and obvious approach everyone would follow, but sponsors rarely appreciate the value of having an insurance policy until after the vendor screws them over, and developers just want to mainline directly into the vendor API so that they can get [insert technology here] listed on their CV's.

Asda hits the brakes on tech tweaks to avoid festive fiasco

Maybe try buying produce when its in season...

Just visited mine and immediately reminded why last time I swore I wasn't coming back. Gaps in the shelves, lots of own branded stuff to the exclusion of all else in some categories. Never been particularly impressed with the quality of their fresh produce either, it just barely makes it to the best before date. If I want cheap and cheerful I'll go to Morrisons.

I think the entire sector has become too big and too diversified. We don't need stores the size of an Olympic stadium with half of the space given over to cheap, disposable fashion and homeware.

NASA's X-59 plane is aiming for a sonic thump, not a boom

Re: Platypus

Japanese bullet train designs have been going the same way. Longer and flatter noses. Not because they travel supersonic exactly but because the shockwave when they enter tunnels causes a boom at the far end.

Brits are scrolling away from X and aren't that interested in AI

"Forty-eight percent of adults had used the technology"

I'm stunned its even that high. I can't think of a single acquaintance who's said to me "look what I did with genAI". Maybe I live on some sort of exalted plane...

Youngsters I can understand dabbling, they have essays to write after all...

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

Guilds are still alive in the UK in the form of the various "approved" schemes for electricians etc. Nothing to do with protecting the customer, everything to do with protecting the livelihood of the scheme members.

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

Architects, not quite creative enough to be artists, not practical enough to be engineers. They inhabit an ethereal space between the two where they are never actually responsible for anything.

[That's slightly unfair, I did know an architect once who knew his stuff well enough to self build his own house, but that would very much be the exception.]

Yup, half of that thought-leader crap on LinkedIn is indeed AI scribbled

"LinkedIn simply does not have content interesting and appealing to minors"

"LinkedIn simply does not have content interesting and appealing [FULLSTOP]"

FTFY.

FTC urges smart device makers to disclose software update lifecycles

How about mandatory software updates?

The choice shouldn't be the manufacturers', it should be the consumers'. So long as a significant percentile of the devices are still in service then software maintenance should be legally mandated. The minimum level would be patching of critical vulns and no end user features removed/broken in the process. Products may end up costing more but they'll be useful for longer so you'll be getting a better deal.

Datacenters could blow up your electric bill thanks to AI

Re: So send the bill to the datacenters

"sounds like a way to charge people more if their local grid is overloaded"

Invert that logic, if my local grid is constrained and unable to meet my increasing requirements (because I now need a HP and two EV chargers) then I should be charged less. That will incentivise the DNO to pull their finger out. The unexpected consequence is that the power leeches may still set up shop and take what they can get at the cheaper rate but potentially not because they are prevented from operating at their preferred scale.

Or how about a fit-for-purpose planning system that requires the stupidly large loads to be located closest to the generators? Instead of building billion dollar cables to move the supply to the M4 corridor, put the data centres on brown field sites in the central belt of Scotland. There are plenty of them and historically they would have been pretty well provisioned for power supply. A few ms extra on the transit links is hardly here nor there for cat videos.

Re: So send the bill to the datacenters

Absolutely.

There should be a surcharge on datacentre tenant's consumption depending on how useful(less) their activities are to society at large.

Use that to subsidise genuinely essential power use like heating our homes and transportation.

How US Dept of Justice's cure for Google could inflict collateral damage

Re: break them really up !

Interesting take. Of course if you turn the personal data side of it into micropayments then the flip side is that you should be making micropayments when you consume the end services. Every search conducted, every email sent, every video watched.

In a way that creates an even higher barrier to entry as end users are unlikely to care about subscribing to niche providers just for the occasional tidbit and will probably be happy enough with the Google/MS/Apple's monthly 9.95 omnibus subscription. And of course as we have seen with streaming services, giving them a monthly fee still doesn't stop them forcing ads down your throat (Now are terrible offenders, Prime have started doing it as well).

I still think that's the solution however, we need to pay for the services so that all the atrocious behaviour on the back-end can become less necessary and can then be legislated away without the incumbents digging their heels in. Unfortunately a whole generation of internet users have become conditioned to everything being free (as well as automatically clicking on the "accept defaults" button to get to the juice as fast as possible,,,). Hell, even I fall into that category, my local "free" newspaper wants 2 quid a month for unlimited online articles, which in the great scheme of things is next to nothing, but I still baulk at it despite it being something genuinely useful and relevant to my life.

Google blocked 1,000-plus pro-China fake news websites from its search results

Re: To what end?

I subscribed to a FB contributor publishing science articles. After a few posts I realised that every single revolutionary world changing discovery was attributed to researchers with Chinese surnames. Not just in Chinese institutions but all over the world.

Could be coincidence, there's a lot of people in the world with Chinese surnames, but I'm more minded to think its part of the ramping up of soft power and there are probably many similar contributors setting the narrative that China is smart, China is your friend etc.

Of course China has the same proportion of smart people as anywhere else but that's offset by a system where smartness is only conditionally rewarded. As for being our friends...

Brazil hooks up with Chinese satellite broadband service that doesn't operate yet

There go the dark skies

Whilst Musky kind of sort of listens when astronomers complain about light and radio pollution from his constellation there is zippo chance that the CCP will give a crap.

BASIC co-creator Thomas Kurtz hits END at 96

"Easily mastered by the average engineer"...

and an oscilloscope to monitor internal activity.

Brings a new meaning to the term "bare metal".

I didn't have a Jupiter Ace either but I read about it and Forth at the time it came out and something stuck with me. Several decades later I wrote a little stack based expression evaluator (RPN basically) and it just seemed incredibly obvious to implement the stack manipulation words like SWAP, DUP, ROT as well. The rest of the team thought I'd lost my mind with this extreme weirdness. It worked exceedingly well however and became the core of our test verification predicates...

Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf

Re: what does ~* do?

~X would expand to the home directory of user X.

Whilst I was a big fan of tcsh in my early unix days I was unaware that ~* expanded to all users home directories. Seems a very odd thing to implement and struggling to think of a good use for it.

And of course emacs can be taught to look after its backup files all on its own.

The NPU: Neural processing unit or needless pricey upsell?

Re: What does an NPU actually do?

Yes, its a castrated GPU and GPU's are castrated FPU's with a bit of vectorisation thrown in.

Airthmetic is quite heavy on clock cycles for general purpose CPU's hence the desire to offload it to dedicated silicon. All we are seeing is a range of designs optimised for different levels of precision as there is a direct (inverse) correlation between precision and throughput.

Canada closes TikTok's offices but leaves using the app a matter of 'personal choice'

Re: Trudeau the terrible tyrant

I was thinking more like 6 months. Something roughly in line with ma(pa)-ternity leave so that employers have to keep your position open for when you are done with your public service. Sure, you'll achieve absolutely nothing because by the time you learn everyone's name it'll all be over, but that's kind of the point and totally in line with the output of elected officials.

Re: Trudeau the terrible tyrant

Yes to negative votes!

"I do not approve of any of these candidates. Show me more options and keep rerunning the contest until you find someone I can in good faith endorse."

Problem is that politics attracts those who are otherwise useless to society. The ones with no actionable competencies. The ones with the mild to extreme personality disorders. Hence the ballot paper stuffed with utter morons. Same with C-level board members. Shit floats.

People with demonstrable skills tend to be happier exercising those skills and keep their heads down and get on with it.

So best solution I can think of is make appointing public sector leaders a random lottery. Bit like jury service. It honestly can't be any worse and it could potentially be a lot better.

The sad tale of the Alpha massacre

Yup, knew immediately when I read that line what was about to happen...

Always, ALWAYS, wrap up procedural things like this into a utility script, no matter how simple. Never try to wing it each time because you will fuck it up eventually no matter how good you are (or think you are).

When the script messes up due to unforeseen circumstances you can strengthen it ($?{VARNAME} syntax etc.) so the next guy is better protected.

The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

Here we go again...

Conflating C and C++...

NHS to launch 'real-time surveillance system' to prevent future pandemics

Re: "prevent future pandemics"

Bit of a stretch to compare random acts of senseless violence with nature doing its thing of trimming the weak and diseased from the gene pool.

Re: "prevent future pandemics"

"using isolation of individuals or populations."

Ordering another lockdown will still be a political decision. Doesn't matter how clever the medical tech is if its left to some muppet in govt to over- or under-react.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

"Wrote a formula that counted the spaces, then added one to calculate (simplified) wordcount"

What if words separated by more than one space? Or tab?

I hope when you say "simplified" that's because you know it won't work in all cases. Maybe "approximate" would be more appropriate.

Six IT contractors accused of swindling Uncle Sam out of millions

Re: Wire fraud ...

"causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce"

Oh goody, wire fraud also includes wireless fraud...

Wire fraud ...

... seems to cover a very wide range of offences.

Is the definition any crime involving something with wires? Which nowadays would be absolutely everything...

Or does it need to involve transmission by wire? What if the offender used wifi? Or fibre?

Combustion engines grind Linus Torvalds' gears

Re: Hmmmm...

"if you started fully charged on a hill going downwards"

Fully aware of round-trip efficiency... but the charge rate on a nearly fully charged battery is far less than on a nearly empty battery, hence fast charge to 80% etc.

Point is that scenarios where the battery cannot sink the full regen current exist so the system must cater to it and that adds mechanical and software complexity.

Re: Hmmmm...

Just as well there are no other areas of expertise other than the means of propulsion required to design a car.

Like suspension, brakes, climate control, safety systems ... oh wait...

The ICE has been refined to the point that they can be banged out cheaply and are basically bullet proof and/or disposable. There might be a lot going on inside but you almost never have to deal with that. When was the last time you heard of someone having their engine rebuilt?

On the other hand can you imagine the complexity of managing regenerative braking? You still need to cut back and forth to the friction brakes in various scenarios and do it so smoothly the driver doesn't notice. If the battery is fully charged you have no where for possibly hundreds of kW of power to go. The rear axle (assuming 2WD) always needs friction braking. To maintain driver feel you blend in the friction brakes at low speeds (so that the motor can simulate creep therefore cannot be generating). I'd love to have a go at that software but I imagine Bosch or Denso can sell you a box off the shelf to do it all.

The complexity comparison for individual components is a complete non sequitur. A car is a package.

Linus Torvalds: 90% of AI marketing is hype

Re: I agree

Which makes designating data centres as Critical National Resources so preposterous.

DC's should be required to tier their tenants from genuinely critical (patient records, banking transactions) through to the trivial and pointless (the other 95%...). When it comes time to shed electrical load they can work through the tenants in reverse order of criticality and kick them off.

The charging structure for the power they consume should be on a similar sliding scale. Use the excess income paid by the useless loads to cross-subsidise essential loads like heating our homes and running public transport.

Softbank CEO says 'super AI' will arrive in 2035 and cost $9T

Roughly when in 2035?

In case I plan something and I'm out when it arrives...

He already invented the worlds largest reality distortion machine. I wonder how many GW it takes to keep that running... What a dick.

Skyscraper-high sewage plume erupts in Moscow

"sewer wear had reached 80 to 90 percent"

Is that like lounge wear?

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

Re: International Atomic Time

"https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time"

By far the worst case is running in one time zone with events referenced to another time zone.

The scenario we had to support was trading North American futures contracts from APAC. Twice a year the trading hours as seen from Asia would shift. Or 4 times a year if you were in Oz... (no DST in most Asian countries).

We got it wrong most times, but the futures traders were utter dicks so they got the quality of service they deserved...

"Stuff like CCTV I don't even bother with the changes"

At least as of yesterday the clock in the car is correct again...

Re: I disagree

"We should move to BST and stay there."

No because in the North of the country it would get light an hour later in the winter and people would be traveling to work/school in the dark with consequent risks to safety. Even on GMT is still pretty dark in the morning in the middle of December in most of Scotland (remember us?).

The UK is located at a moderately high latitude therefore the amount of daylight varies greatly between mid summer and mid winter. There is no one size fits all solution that will give you 8 hours of darkness just when you want it all year round in which to get your beauty sleep. GMT/BST is the compromise that attempts to balance that.

Fujitsu claims 634-gram 14-inch Core i7 laptop is world's lightest

Kana

"the machines' use of a keyboard that doesn't offer Japanese kana notation"

Odd that kana aren't printed on the keycaps, but everyone I know uses input converters and the two keys either side of the space bar to toggle that on and off are present.

If a westerner did get hold of one they will have a merry time leanring the location of the punctuation keys on a JIS keyboard...

以上です

IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4, argues APNIC's chief scientist

Re: Hence, IPv6

I think the missed opportunity here was to make addresses variable length.

My ISP would give me a single public address and I would add on a postfix to make my internal devices directly reachable should I wish, or I could NAT everything behind it if I don't. The closer you are to the core of the network the shorter the addresses can be. Further out in the galactic hinterland the addresses get longer. Its what address classes were trying to do in the first place but without any practical limit on the total number of hosts.

If it was thought of at the time then I'm sure it would have been dismissed on the grounds of performance. Fixed sized records with fixed offsets would have been, and may still be, the only way to switch traffic fast enough in the most demanding cases.

It could potentially still be retrofitted to v4. Keep the current addressing scheme as the base so all existing routes still work. Append the extended postfix address as header options(*). You'd still need DNS upgrades and hosts would need to be taught to populate the extended addresses in order to reach the servers buried deeper in the net but thats all doable through the regular cadence of OS updates..

Rule #1 of rolling out a shiny new system, make it backwards compatible so that 99% of the installed base don't even know its happened.

(*) Seems that header options are considered potentially dangerous and intermediate routers may throw them away. But that's a lot easier to change than getting absolutely everyone to be dual stack.

Yet another UK government seeks to reform GDPR

"Data is the DNA of modern life"

Odd analogy. DNA if anything is meta-data. Its the schema that controls how we are built.

But I'm sure that's the least we have to worry about where this govt is concerned...

China's top messaging app WeChat banned from Hong Kong government computers

Its astonishing the amount of use of back-channels like WhatsApp groups by UK politicians. Its either gross stupidity or willful neglect of duty. Either should be enough to get them taken round behind the sheds and "re-educated".

In the commercial world we are constantly warned that this sort of behaviour is against policy but in the commercial world the risk of sanctions is real for both for the individual and the firm. Approved communications channels are there for one reason and one reason only, so that the contents can be archived for future reference. Going outside of that says either you don't get it or you don't want to get it.

IT specialists?

Remember the Scottish minister who took his Parliamentary iPad on holiday, the one with government and constituency business on it (or at least accessible via it)? Who then let his kids use it as a hotspot to watch streaming football matches and racked up a bill of tens of thousands in roaming charges? Who was extremely economical with the truth when the charges were highlighted by the media and was protected by the party elders for months until, even to them, his position became untenable?

Apart from all the political and personal failures to act with integrity, what sort of IT organisation sends out official devices that allow that sort of use?

It's about time Intel, AMD dropped x86 games and turned to the real threat

Re: x86 Train Wreck

My last place used the Intel compiler suite for the longest time because it supposedly did generate optional binary code for different processor variants. Only problem was the firm refreshed with AMD based servers shortly afterwards... We eventually wrestled the code base back onto gcc.

Richard Branson to take balloon ride to edge of space

The story of the R101 makes for similar grisly reading. There's quite a good Cautionary Tale on it.

Re: 5 of Richard Branson's balloon adventures - in his own words

There was a wonderful cartoon in a newspaper after one of those exploits depicting the bearded one being winched out of the sea with the caption "Bring out the Branson".

[Branston (with a T) being a brand of sweet pickle who used the tag-line "Bring out the Branston" in their TV ads.]

Gary Marcus proposes generative AI boycott to push for regulation, tame Silicon Valley

Re: Boycotting

What do you have against Belgium? They make some of the nicest beer...

The billionaire behind Trump's 'unhackable' phone is on a mission to fight Tesla's FSD

"the result of 40 years of technology"

40 years ago you didn't really have an OS as we know them now. All you had was a program loader and majority of machines weren't connected to anything other than a power outlet.

Its taken us the intervening 40 years to build a Hydra-like nightmare with all the unintended consequences for security. All the billionaire had to do was stand still...

UK electronics firms want government to stop taxing trash and let them fix it instead

The workers at our local tip seem to spend the majority of their time fishing stuff out of the skips and putting it to one side...

Similar thing in the UK for energy efficiency products like insulation.

Pay some idiot to come around and bodge it for you, he can supply the materials VAT free or reduced, but that's totally negated by the need to pay him for his services. Do it yourself and take time and care over it to make sure its done right and you get shafted by having to pay full VAT.

Why the distinction? Its almost as if the politicians are deliberately trying to direct business to their dodgy mates....

Any product that has some aspect of social good attached to it -- improving living conditions, reducing waste -- should automatically be zero rated. Its pretty bloody simple.