Posts by Bebu sa Ware

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

"Never any US to UK translation."

Why is it that Americans seem unable to deal with UK English. We in the UK seem to manage to deal with the US version. We have to. There is never any US to UK translation.

The mapping from en_UK to en_US is (very) many to one with the consequent loss of meaning for the great many concepts the American intellect is unable to grasp.

Mapping from en_US is basically choosing the en_UK word or concept from the shallowest available which even densest of the pommy polloi can manage in their heads.

Plan to keep advanced chips from China with tracking tech gains support in Congress

IPv6

Lots of US companies bought IPv4 ranges from LACNIC and AFNIC (and even from RIPE) for US usage due to the lack of available ranges in the US.

Rather a joke on the US if the only out was wider adoption of IPv6 in the US which I suspect is currently miniscule. The PRC and East Asia generally IPv6 is more prevalent and maybe the rule.

I don't know if or how geolocation works with IPv6 but I would think each /48 prefix would map directly to the entity assigned the prefix which I guess in the absence of NAT or proxy/gateways would be better than IPv4.

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

"A professional knows exactly how bad a job they can get away with, ...."

"A professional knows exactly how bad a job they can get away with, while an amateur does the best job they possibly can for the love of it."

Could apply with even greater applicability to a very much old profession.† Moll's Law?

_{† arguably both trades involve a soft something and invariably f...ing that something.}

US tech titans rejoice in $600B Saudi shopping spree

Cooling seems like a real problem though

something on El Rego a while ago that it was easier to cool datacenters† in hot dry environments (deserts) than in not quite so hot humid environments (tropics.)

I don't remember whether the hot dry cooling was predicated on evaporating water into the dry atmosphere or some other reason. Fresh water is not something the gulf is exactly awash in. I guess you might be able to harness the waste heat to assist the desalination of seawater.

With a little luck the bottom will fall out of the AI tulip market before the hardware is paid for or shipped and old bin bone saw can reneg on the deal in much the same way the Trumpty administration has done on a plethora of long standing agreements.

_{† datacentres is a real word but just doesn't look right. Peculiar.}

Yolk's on you – eggs break less when they land sideways

Small quibble...

The drop height was measured according to fig. 2(b) from the bottom of the shell to the impacted surface rather than from the egg's centre of mass.

The CoM to surface distance minus the distance from the CoM to the shell surface vertically below will determine the maximum velocity just before impact.

So the an egg dropped pointy end first would potentially drop further but impact slightly earlier than one dropped lying on its side.

The paper's authors have referenced Dean Swift's seminal work on taxonomy of egg morphology but have seen fit to ignore his universal if not uncontroversial nomenclature big endian and little endian for blunt end and sharp end† respectively.

_{† only generations raised with plastic scissors etc could imagine any aspect of an egg as being sharp.}

Microsoft wants us to believe AI will crack practical fusion power, driving future AI

Re: Fusion is not "infinite free energy", sadly

Some of the fusion power could be used to convert the atmospheric CO₂ back into coal which we could bury again. Ultimately we might reduced the greenhouse gases to well below preindustrial level so that much more low grade heat could be radiated into space. Yes and Musk will ace quantum gravity.

Still you are entirely correct. Fusion isn't a magic pudding electric battery you load up with tritium and get electricity out with 100% conversion.

Practical fusion reactors will be incredibly inefficient and produce unwanted waste and contamination unlike Čapek's Karburator which initially appeared to be of the magic pudding variey.

The fusion reactor components will wear out and presumably become quite radioactive which isn't altogether that different from the waste issues current fission reactors face.

Pentagon declares war on 'outdated' software buying, opens fire on open source

Re: open source software, with contributions from developers worldwide

"So the Army and Airforce are going to be forced to use a language invented by an Admiral?"

COBOL like ADA probably wouldn't suffer from buffer overflows or use after free defects.

Hardly imagine this new lot of nongs are likely to require new software to be coded in Rust or Go or any other memory safe language. Mandating Ada never worked although AdaCores SPARK Ada derivative wouldn't be the worst choice.

As always getting a usable specification out of those newly sporting the mandated Warrior Ethos might prove definitively impossible. "Listen here! What the fuck do you actually want? I will rephrase that. What the fuck do you think you want?"

I imagine there are smiles galore in Moscow and Peking not forgetting Pyongyang where most of the code will likely be written.

How stupid can stupid get before it ceasing being just stupid but something qualitatively and not just quantitatively different and possibly completely novel? Hyperstultality? I am afraid we may well be doomed soon to find out.

Zuck ghosts metaverse as Meta chases AI goldrush

Re: Ugh.. I hope this doesn't kill VR

VR uses?

In order -

Porn

Gaming + porn

Selling kitchens + porn (No? A sheltered life?)

A bit like MacD's fries porn goes with anything.

I would have thought generative AI and VR would have been marriage made in heaven misalliance made in hell but exceeding profitable nonetheless. AI's penchant extraneous, non-contiguous limbs, heads and "other bits" while exceedingly weird, would certainly keep things fresh.

Ghost in the shell script: Boffins reckon they can catch bugs before programs run

Re: Bash compiler ?

"bag of a fag packet task"

Sometime a typo just makes it golden. :))

Google goes cold on Europe: Stops making smart thermostats for continental conditions

Re: Bollocks

Norway, it's the definition of special case when it comes to electricity.

Curious. What's Norway's particular distinction?

A quick look it seems they have the usual eurodiversity of plugs and sockets (C&F) which always seems odd to Australasians who have a one single phase (10A) type I (note to self: phase and neutral reversed in Argentina.)

How to stay on Windows 10 instead of installing Linux

At least somewhere things are looking up...

"For hoi polloi ..."

The Vulture earns kudos for omitting the redundantly prefixed "the."

God didn't have a plan for Gelsinger at Intel. Maybe there is one for his new gig, Gloo

Re: his favorite Bible verse and guiding principle is Colossians 3:23

"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God"

(Mark 10:25?)

I shouldn't have thought one needed to add AI hallucinations to the fairy tales of the literally interpreted bible.

Given someone who is rich is a modern interpolation of a rich man he might as well undergo gender reassignment rather than marching his dwarf camels through the eye of a giant needle.

Given the passage also appears in Matthew and Luke I would like to think it does go back to the historical Jesus and to be understood more deeply.

Only the most unthinking literalist would hold the kingdom of God to be be some prize postmortal Shangri-La awarded to the faithful. Fairly clearly intended to refer to a very earthly way of living in this world. And after two millennia the observation that the very wealthy are not on the whole great people when dealing with their fellows. Perhaps notable that rather than stating the impossibility, an unlikely improbability is used as not to categorically exclude a rich man from being a good man.

Personally I think I could get a live normal adult camel through the eye of a normally sized needle although I am not saying the camel would survive the operation. You can liquidize anything - camel smoothie anyone? Literally I imagine one could pass a fertilized camel ovum through the eye of a needle and given how the human equivalent is treated I could equally claim a camel had passed through the eye and on AI implantation be born and live.

"Ye cannot serve God and mammon."† Mammon really is the only significant deity worshipped in the US and the rest is hypocritical blasphemous bullshit.

_{† Matthew 6:24 KJV}

2 in 5 techies quit over inflexible workplace policies

Randstad Report

The Ranstad Report presumably referenced in the article https://www.randstad.ca/employers/workplace-insights/talent-management/2025-workplace-trends-job-market-analysis/ is a bit light on detail.

I would be interested for the tech population what age,sex,education,marital status, mortgage etc v. likelihood of leaving,

Off the top of my head I world guess the older, better educated and financially stable would be in pole position in the sod off grand pricks.

4-day work-week pilot due in tech land by early summer

"Let me locate the right wall...

The Register asked Microsoft what its plans are, if any, and a spokesperson said "let me look into this for you and let you know if we have anything to add."

"... and I'll get back to you when I've determined what shit is still sticking this week."

EU OS drafts a locked-down Linux blueprint for Eurocrats

Re: Why even have a local disk?

Sun X terminals, no local storage, runs over the network. What goes around comes around.‡

I recall NCD and most vendors' X terminals were also normally diskless.

Wasn't particularly uncommon to run Sun workstations diskless in the days when SCSI disks were a significant part of a systems cost.

Later probably more common to run them dataless† (pretty much the same configuration as is suggested in this article) but at the time mostly to reduce the load on the network.

When switched gigabit networking appeared I imagined that network data throughput would be greater than the average local disk and SAN technology (eg iSCSI) would replace local disks with central storage pools. Never really happened.

‡"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." Eccl. 1:9 KJV

_{† /, swap, ±/var local disk partitions; /usr, /home ±data file systems NFS mounted}

VanHelsing ransomware emerges to put a stake through your Windows heart

Oops...

I didn't realise there were still hosts using the .SU TLD. ;)

OTF, which backs Tor, Let's Encrypt and more, sues to save its funding from Trump cuts

I don't think the adminstration sees the problem...

"leave millions of people worldwide trapped behind authoritarian information firewalls."

as they are likely calling for EOI for information firewalls for the Mexican and Canadian borders. You don't want undocumented ideas supplanting the regime approved ones in the heads of decent Americans. /s

Linus Torvalds forgot to release Linux 6.14 for a whole day

Nowruz?

Over the weekend the Chief Penguin kicking up his heels celebrating Persian New Year with his local Iranian etc community?

Still a good sign that everyday life just got in the way and he just forgot but candidly admitted his oversight later.

23andMe's genes not strong enough to avoid Chapter 11

Re: The court will now oversee the sale of 23andMe's assets

"Welsh politician who had done one of these tests and it showed he was 2% Nigerian"

I was thinking some bronze Age tin traders from Africa going on to Cymru after Cornwall, for the rugger, but a legion of Welsh Casanovas ravishing sub Saharan Africa far more likely.

Re: The court will now oversee the sale of 23andMe's assets

But, it's my DNA not theirs

But is it yours alone?

It's definitely shared between biological members of your family and what you might do with it can have serious impacts on them.

My personal opinion is the my genome is the most literal legacy or inheritance from my parents and forbears, and that I have a responsibility as a custodian to care for and protect it. I would never provide a sample to any DNA testing or ancestry service and only as a last resort to a medical laboratory.

Life and medical insurance corporations would dearly love to have access to the DNA of everyone just for starters.

Re: Just don't!

"Without a copy of everyone's DNA how will they detect possible Canadians?"

Easy. Canadians only possessed two of each autosomal chromosome whereas MAGA types clearly have an extra helping.

NASA rewrites Moon mission goals in quiet DEI retreat

Re: Good

spaceship filled entirely with white men heads to the stars to propagate humanity throughout the galaxy...

I pissed myself with the picture of an armada of incel filled spaceships being hurled into the void with the promise of an inexhaustible supply of scantily clad alienesses (all bearing a remarkable resemblance to Leia Organa) with whom they might freely propagate themselves. ("To boldly go where no man has gone before!" Come? :)

The Golgafrinchan solution?

Artemis being named after an ancient Greek goddess.

I imagine the NASA chaps^† who chose the name knew the other 300 million largely lacking a credible education, let alone a classical one, knew if that unwashed thought at all, they would believe it was Artemus a bloke's name (like Artemus Gordon, James West's sidekick form The Wild Wild West.)

Probably why they didn't opt for the Roman Dianna.

_{† meant inclusively.}

Re: Insane

"Doesn't make them not nuts. They still live there for a start."

One must be grateful for small mercies.

You wouldn't want boatloads of the ever so slightly not quite so nuts coming to the shores of the UK and signing up for Faredge's Reform Lunacy? And bringing their anti-vax, creationism, guns crazy ideas to boot.

Leave the blighters to the Hell they have created for themselves.

Is Washington losing its grip on crypto, or is it a calculated pivot to digital dominance?

Is Washington losing its grip...?

Pretty much a rhetorical question I would have thought.

The only thing the tossers in charge have got a grip on...

Google admits it deleted some customer data after 'technical issue'

Re: Google admits it deleted some customer data after 'technical issue'

Anyone who put their data on Google is a moron

Or is relying on the Chocolate Factory ... to "lose it."

Microsoft tastes the unexpected consequences of tariffs on time

If they could, they wouldn't...

"Nobody at Microsoft has read The Good Soldier Švejk, quite possibly ... because none of them can read."

Although the contemporary antics of Microsoft and the Nation that produced it could have been scripted by Alfred Jarry.

"Post-literate?"

I suspect illiterate is more accurate. One doesn't usually describe mediaeval serfs as post-literate nor the Greek peasants listening to a recitation of the Odyssey following the late Bronze Age collapse.

Feds charge three over Molotov attacks on Tesla sites in multiple states

I Wonder Where This Bit Came From?

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends,^† it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it."

Are we near yet?

_{† Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.}

Museum digs up Digital Equipment Corporation's dusty digital equipment

Very Curious

"The Alpha chipset continued to evolve in China, I have been told by my old Singapore contacts."

if factual.

Dearly love to know more. ;)

Re: Progress

"Isn't this why UNIX had the split /usr directory structure?"

I suspect probably a few reasons.

When file systems weren't particularly reliable especially after power loss or kernel crashes having a small fairly static root file system/partition probably meant a better chance of fsck fixing the file system on boot instead of a rescue/restore.

When Sun et al. put workstations on networks which could then share file systems (NFS, RFS) and understanding SCSI and IPI disks were small (MB) and expensive that it was fairly common to configure diskfull workstations with a local root file system, swap, possibly /var and /home with the /usr NFS mounted read only from a server.

For diskless workstations each NFS mounted an individual root, etc but shared a single NFS mounted /usr.

With sharing between different Sparc hardware you had the added complexity of /usr/kvm.

Grand days lad, I'm thinking we'll never see their like again. (Lad thinking: We must be thankful for small mercies. ;)

NASA's inbox goes orbital after email mishap spams entire space industry

I can see it...

One Act Tragedy - Much To Undo About Everything

Doge nong: "What do you do around here boy?"

Greybearded Sysadmin: "Hell I spend every working hour just stopping shit happening."

Doge nong: "You're obviously not with the program. Definitely not hardcore. You're outa here boy!"

[Exuent Greybeard to a well deserved, long overdue retirement and the Nong to his just desserts.]

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

Re: I definitely need new glasses

The Boss is peeing over my shoulder

I wondered where he^† ended up.

_{† advisedly. She is another story entirely.}

Quantum Computing

"We have here a Schrödinger's firmware situation,"

"The box ... it is both dead and alive. However, once I power cycle it, it will be one or the other – and most likely dead."

In the Many Worlds Interpretation there must be one world where every firmware update (ultimately) succeeded which is possibly the best evidence against that interpretation.

Although I have noticed once I have finally got one difficult firmware (bios) update to finally work identical hardware just falls into line. Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields?

Re: Schrödinger's firmware situation

I think of them as UTIs (I for Individuals).

You're just taking the piss (albeit painfully.)

Cloudflare builds an AI to lead AI scraper bots into a horrible maze of junk content

Re: So the AI wars has begun

"In the future, AI will argue with other AI about the meaning of Christmas while people scavenge for food in trash bins."

Just outsourcing to AI of the status quo:

"Arseholes argue with other arseholes about the meaning of Christmas while people scavenge for food in trash bins."

Obviously the CloudFlare writer doesn't get out much...

“No real human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense”

"I wonder if they'd be up for a friendly wager..."

Candy from a kid, I would think.

Clearly the writer hadn't visited MAGA world as just the anti-vax internet rabbit holes are more than four deep chock-full of nonsense that would make any AI confabulator blush.

This AI honeypot is supposedly baited with an unrelated collection of factual material which is asserted protects the later users of the poisoned AI from misleading output. I would imagine one of the more common types of misleading information is claiming two or more facts are causally related when they are demonstrably not.

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Memories

I remember the steno- & dicto-typists moving from IBM golf balls to PCs pretty much effortlessly. The speed they could type was phenomenal. The software (WordStar later WordPerfect) didn't faze them at all. Flakey floppy disks 8"&5¼" and printers especially those lacking A4 support were the two that gave them most grief.

"Promotion" from the shop floor was usual back then when computers were first introduced. I recall a young bloke just started working as an apprentice storeman when the company installed a minicomputer based warehousing system and called from the corps of storeman for volunteers to be trained to look after the system. Needless to say the lad was the only taker and for his sins a long career in IT followed.

Privacy warriors whip out GDPR after ChatGPT wrongly accuses dad of child murder

Re: No care, no responsibility

Did you hate Musk before he started supporting Trump?

Yes.

His pedoguy nonsense sealed it.

Then despise rather than hate but in 2025 he has fully earned the hard core hatred he is being accorded.

The post-quantum cryptography apocalypse will be televised in 10 years, says UK's NCSC

Re: Bollocks

"And there is probably a lot of data that doesn't really need to be encrypted at all."

But you encrypt it anyway to thwart traffic analysis and friends.

You are right that if you don't require perfect forward secrecy of more than a few years and you are using current cryptography then quantum computing isn't really a threat.

SystemRescue 12 lands with added bcachefs support

"Torvalds will not be a happy ... penguin."

I understood that the penguin was chosen because the ones he saw in a zoo were feisty if not outright agro.

Too many software supply chain defense bibles? Boffins distill advice

Log4j

I vaguely recall Log4j was a poor design decision inherited from more naive times rather an active supply chain attack.

Given the current uncritical acceptance and incorporation of AI/LLM into organisational IT I would hope manglement take one hand off their old man before waffling on about supply chain threats.

Re: Bullshit, you have to trust someone.

... you grow your own wheat, mill your own flour and bake your own bread

Project US 2029?

Tesla Cybertruck recall #8: Exterior trim peels itself off, again

Re: Glue?

"borrow some iPhone battery glue."

Or not source the two part epoxy from the local two dollar / pound shop.

I suspect the original glue only design was a recognisably poor choice (amongst a slew of others.)

If I were compelled to drive one I would at least have the rust inclined stainless painted donkey dick pink.:)

Re: "environmental embrittlement"

"Did Elon have a bigger hand in the minutiae of the design process than previously believed."

Likely but I question which part of his anatomy was involved.

Oops, they did it again: Microsoft breaks Outlook with another dubious update

"Testing? We've heard of it"

Probably no skilled staff left to do the testing.

Outlook QA Manager: "Can you guys stop banging aways at those keyboards? You are never going to manage Hamlet. Give us hand over here."

Asahi Linux loses another prominent dev as GPU guru calls it quits

An Interesting Article in IEEE Spectrum not entirely irrelevant...

Charity Majors writes in IEEE Spectrum (13 March 2025):

In Praise of “Normal” Engineers A software engineer argues against the myth of the “10x engineer”

Three of the subheadings give the flavour of the writer's thesis:

"Engineers don’t own software, teams own software"

"The best engineering organizations are the ones where normal engineers can do great work"

"Don’t hire the 'best' people. Hire the right people"

Worth a read as I imagine the arguments would equally apply more widely than just software development.

Political poker? Tariff hunger games? Trump creates havoc for PC industry

"as seems likely - he isn't even thinking that far into the future"

Leaving aside the question of patent cognitive dysfunction, I don't imagine his fat carcass will stay warm that far into the future.

The current political épandage will be nothing compared to the shit hitting the fan should Vance subsequently assume the purple.

Nvidia invests in quantum computing weeks after CEO said it's decades from being useful

Re: QC is in a superposition of useful and not useful, eventually it'll collapse

Clearly a spin state that's entangled with company's share price.

VA IT contract cancellation DOGE boasted about ... was due to end in 10 days anyway

Re: Wasn't it ideal

"Elon, his cadre of 20-somethings"

I reckon "something" here is doing more heavy lifting than a SpaceX first stage. :)

Re: What could possibly be done in the last 10 days of a multi-year contract anyway?

"But these are military veterans in a country that worships military service. The cruelty is the point!"

Reading Coriolanus might indicate the possible pitfalls of that policy.