Posts by Bebu sa Ware 2773 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Nov 2024
Unfortunately we had to as we could no longer source the drums even when the magnetic core† was still available.
Swapping to ½" magnetic tape was apparently a thing in the dim past - so I was told once (also now in the only slightly less dim past) although the piss might have been taken.
† core was still used in industrial contexts well into the 1980s because it was non·volatile and I suppose physically robust.
I think I saw something on Phoronix a few months ago that migrating compressed pages to swap while keeping compression was work in progress. Apparently not as straightforward as first appears.
Given block devices have a read/write granularity of a "block" there wouldn't be much point in writing a 4K page compressed to 1K to a 4K disk block so I suppose it needs another layer between zram and the disk swap to manage multiplexing compressed pages into disk blocks efficiently.
Personally I use zram just to reduce write traffic to the SSD swap partition but not really a problem in my case.
Outside the business and official users — such as community clubs etc Word97 .doc format is still the lngua franca for document exchange.
One might shudder at all those Windows 9X and XP PCs out there running Office97. Reality has a nasty habit of knocking the shit out of illusions.
Actually there are a lot of Openoffice/Libreoffice installed by relatives, neighbours etc, on somewhat more recent PCs with the strict instrucion to always save in "office 97-2000" format with the user often unaware that it is not MS slop.
Her indoors had both LibreOffice (first) and Office2019 (later) on her Win7 PC but the default remained LO until an update of something "fixed" that. A frantic frantic phone call about how something had completely broken MS Office and she could do anything thing - after more than a few (cross) words I worked out that she hadn't ever seen Office2019 and told her to click on the LibreOffice icon and find her documents from "recent."
Uninstalled Office2019 on the next visit as clearly MS had "broken" it. So I had the install media and two licences for 2019 with zero likelihood of their ever being used.
For almost all such users Wordpad or MS Works would have been more than adequate.
From memory /etc/shadow already has a couple of "age" fields. ;)
An /etc/bollocks file
# @(#) /etc/bollocks - see /etc/termcap
logname:has=[y|n]:dob=yyyymmdd:maturity=years:preferences=[lbtiq+]:
There will likely be a RFC for the LDAP schema but the US has pretty much redefined RFC to mean really fucked consensus.
Does anyone else get the sense that Elizabeth Holmes was five years too early to catch this tsunami of shite engulfing the planet?
With a little help from the AI grifterhood the rising tide of AI effluent could have lifted even the Theranos wreck.
In that alternative leg of the trousers of time she might have had RFKjr's job: Health and Human Services Secretary.
(And you were thinking we were already in the worst of all possible worlds.)
Finally a subscription service I could flash the plastic for.
Especially if this Plague·as·a·Service offers volume discounts and family plans.
Tailored or customised offerings would be nice: a choice of disgusting purulent buboes or massive internal hemorrhaging for that fashionable Ebola look.
Really a reboot of the Interflora business model.
Interpox "Say it with the pox." (So they know how you really feel.)
PHB: What about floating point support ?
Sales: I can honestly say the 386SX's floating support and performance is nothing like anything currently on the market.
Today you could probably get a few bucks from the poor souls that need to maintain ancient and irreplaceable laboratory instruments. Outside industrial control kit, mainboards that sport ISA slots or EISA slots make unobtainium supplies look like a glut.
"ISO 3103 was produced by ISO Technical Committee 34 (Food products), Sub-Committee 8 (Tea)."
If there were any lingering doubt whether the human population of Earth is actually descended from the survivors of the Golgafrinchan B ark this ought to allay any such misgivings.
"Ireland was the only ISO member country to object to the standard, doing so on technical grounds."
Unless those grounds were tea's ethanol content (absence of), an unexpected outbreak of sanity.
Bugger!
I actually searched for that being curious how long ago the Frogs came with that horreur… then I pronounced it my head — right. Very drole.
I hated the stuff as a kid - it was either too dry and took the skin off the top your mouth or too soggy - like sodden cardboard which it tasted like, either way.
I always imagined it was a peculiarly Australasian atrocity but with a slight change in spelling I now understand it is also concocted in the UK and according to WikiP, inflicted on another 80 nations.
"also building policy, like hours to take the trash, expected pets' owners' actions, and common areas schedule, such as volleyball court area and BBQ area usage."
All the stuff that was posted on a pin-board in the foyer (or lobby) within my memory.
Pretty dismal that we expect every morsel of trite and essentially static information to be delivered with all the razzamatazz befitting a hollywood blockbuster.
I might even accept an e-paper notice board as a replacement for paper but I suspect the environmental footprint of the e-paper screens would be equivalent to pallet loads of reams of A4 paper.
Given the number of satellites up there, one in four thousand seems distinctly dangerous.
Probably why all these obscene zillionaires have pretty deep bunkers – for when the sky falls.
I would be curious how these odds (probabilities) were calculated.
One in 4200 just meant that when the probe hit the Earth there was a probability of ~0.00024 of someone somewhere being injured but given there is a vast excess of us infesting this poor planet the actual chances of hiting any particular person are vanishing small. The inhabited parts of the whole planet are only a small fraction of the entire surface area.
I vaguely recall Frederick Lanchester did a similar, if decidedly peculiar, calculation involving a baby in wartime Berlin
"He really does want to live forever in the AI."
He is is welcome to that particularly exquisite Hell.
Perhaps if got off the Special-K for a few days and watched Zardoz - anything deeper than a teaspoon or more meaningful than a dog turd would be wasted on Space Karen - he might perceive the tempting hand of the Fiend.
"much ketamine was consumed that day."
More than enough but too far under its LD50 to be the desirable outcome.
If this show ever gets on the road any astronaut signing up should automatically receive the highest US award for courage
Appointing Baldrick with his stock of "cunning plans" to manage the shambles could only be an improvement.
"what's the plan for when its power grid is knocked out"
Don't even need a power outage, a network outage will do it.
Back in 2023 when Optus had one of their more spectacular cockups lasting most of a day, cash had to be trucked to the banks so the population could purchase food and other luxuries.
Elections are all pencil and paper ballots, manually counted. Add compulsory voting and preferential voting - basically everyone over 18 gets the chance to demonstrate they cannot count from 1 to typically somewhere around 10.
It probably comes as a complete surprise to left pondians that most who voted can count and can cast a valid vote and that the results are usually clear by 9pm of election night.
Do we get a better class of politician ? Sadly I have to say "no" - we scrape the bottom of the same rotten barrel as everybody else, I suspect.
easy to do I suppose in this flood of shit but I don't quite see the obvious distinction between a browser with password manager auto filling the Amazon login and this botty thingy.
I am guessing that the bot is grabbing hundreds or thousands of pages of listings in an impossibly small time. Presumably throttling the traffic would be the easy fix.
At this point anything that totally screws these mega online souks ought to be encouraged. I suspect the at least equally shitty Chinese sites won't be so precious.
Dark patterns slain by even darker patterns.
The contrary doesn't bear thinking about. ;)
This reminded me of a product (from back when) which was rather clever for its time: Wendin-DOS: the forgotten-multi-tasking, multi-user MSDOS clone from the 1980.
While the toolkit used for for its construction was sold as separate products ie source available, the actual OS products (DOS, VMS, Unix) were only offered as binaries. You can still find copies on the net in the usual murky places.
Apart from glue code (mostly to get round the PC's non-reentrant BIOS) it was all written in C.
The only thing Wendin-DOS didn't support was TSRs — although I am sure DR-DOS 9.0 will, surely. ;)
Young chaps banging away on keyboards in their dorm rooms never produced a significant OS - did they ? ;)
I would have thought specifying outages per 100 GBP might have risk invoking national stereotypes in the case of Scotland.
After all a 100 punds is a 100 punds. 0.67 outages per £100 so one outages then ? ;)
Curious why Glasgow topped 0.94 — do the hard men regularly give the cabinets a good kickin' ?
Mine's a Hunting Stuart.
I can just barely begin to imagine a 800VDC copper vapour arc with heaven only know how many amps passing through it in the microseconds before the superheated metal vapour reacts rather violently with the oxygen.
To my my untutored mind I might have thought multiphase 800V AC at a couple hundred Hz to the rack units that convert down to 50VDC or whatever might be more manageable.
I guess it is a really good time to be a power engineer. The mechanical engineers that are the full bottle on massively scaleable cooling technologies are also getting season tickets for this gravy train. One is feeding the beast and the other carrying away the excrement. :)
"Musk & Donald = Two narcissistic cheeks of the same ARSE!"
I was thinking more of the back passage. The anal sphincter consists of two muscles the Elon internal anal sphincter† and the Donald external anal sphincter through both of which all their shit and wind must pass.
When I think of it — when Trump is telling outright porkies the shape of his mouth makes me wonder whether he has inherited two sets of these sphincters.
† Unsurprisingly the one closest to the brown stuff.
That you Gus ?
What have you been doing since sir Roysten pulled the plug on GlobeLink ?
Getting the Tories' ducks in a line so they are all on the same page ? Or was it Labour or Reform … not that it matters much; your unmistakable touch is evident.
surely ?
The upside if any is that enterprise back up and recovery processes will improve immeasurably (or not.) Of course the corporate clowns that mandated the deployment of this nonsense inevitably ensured that it had its tentacles deeply into those back up and recovery processes.
I don't know about the rest of you but as soon as manglement start screwing with those processes, I grab my coat and head for exit.
I think that is probably arse about. Should have read: "verified [brain dead] humans tethered to [LLM] agents."
Yesterday, when I first encounterd the phrase "facially incomplete", I immediately thought of Meta and Zuckerthingy… I wonder why?
Not so much facie imperfecta as faece perfecta
We stopped drawing infantile pictures on cave walls and started using linear sequences of symbols not too long after we stopped being monkeys.
GUIs (outside of intrinsically graphical applications) are for monkeys and unevolved humans and typically waste an immense amount of the time of those not so completely clueless.
The irony of agentic AI finding these "easy to use and intuitive" GUIs beyond its much touted capabilities is to be savoured. These interfaces are supposedly designed in order that any fool can drive them but in the event these GUIs are somewhat more selective as which fools are able to take the wheel.
Doubtless world best practice failure.
The idea, I suspect, is that if everything approaches asymptotically some infinity of fuckedupedness™ that most things at least those that seem to matter might magically start working.
Seems to be the new faith currently sweeping the globe.
So far we are well on track for that rendezvous with the mindless nirvana of absolute fuckedupedness™ but the magically start working part is looking a tad doubtful.
might now escape landfill for a useful life running LTSC or IOT Win10, Linux or even ChromeOS Flex.
Perversely my only Chromebook was reflashed and now runs Mint usably but did run Win10 (slowly) out of curiosity.
ChromeOS was something that on the face of it seemed like a good idea but turned out to be a fairly shitty nightmare version of the "walled garden."
Most users might conclude "if I wanted to be fucked over by the the likes of Apple, I might as well be fucked over by Apple - at least they administer the beatings with flair and some class."
The maker of one single app is going to allow itself to wipe your phone if it doesn't like what it sees ?
As I read it this piece of Microslop shit doesn't wipe your phone or its arse; it just erases the stored credentials (and configurations?) for any work or educational Microslop account.
Perhaps a case of 'Render unto Caesar' — fine as long as the empire provides the device to be rendered unto.
Using a dedicated 2G or 3G phone as a work phone in Australia has real merit. ;)
Certainly make for a quieter life since 2G, 3G networks (and recently non-VoLTE 4G) have been decommissioned for quite a while.
I miss my Nokia Asha 300 which I did use for work until 3G was pulled. Still have the handset.
50Hz and 60Hz — that assumes they would use similar range of frequencies to transmit electricity (AC.) They could use DC as we do for underwater cables or transmit power non-electrically eg chemically. Might even capture and use electrical energy so efficiently that there are practically no electromagnetic emissions.
I suspect no matter how you broadcast to the cosmos, the energy and information entropy spread over interstellar volumes makes detection at any realistic distance extremely unlikely. Even at 4 light years the whole of the original "I Love Lucy" broadcasts even compressed into one ½hr would be spread pretty thinly.
The simplest reason might be that an actually intelligent and civilised ET civilisation realised fairly quickly that, while there were almost certainly other comparable civilisations out there, those civilisations would be separated from them and each other by unimaginable expanses of time and space.
So sensibly they concentrated on improving their own civilisation and culture as well as exploring their local few hundred light years and observing the rest of the cosmos.
The effective cordon sanitaire imposed by interstellar distances on any life in the Universe is one of the few things to my mind that speaks for a providential creator but could just as likely be an inescapable consequence of the inevitable physics.
If you think about it — imagine SETI receives an unequivocal ET message from a 1000 light years distant system. What is the point of replying when it is currently odds-on that in 2000 years the return communication would likely find humanity back to banging rocks and that is if we haven't awarded ourselves a Darwin award as a species.
If our neighbours have been receiving 1950-70s US TV sitcoms and soap opera their astonished silence is entirely comprehensible.
Perhaps not quite.
I vaguely recall the magnetisation of typical media changes the polarisation of reflected light so it might be possible to optically scan a shagged out DDS/DAT tape (or even a dodgy compact cassette with your ZX80 programs on it) and store it for posterity.
I think Sony magnetoptical drives might have used this property.
Since everyone is obviously taking the piss out of a very stupid idea — it is fairly obvious to anyone that is just an ambit claim by Musk and Co to a fair chunk of low orbital real estate rather like the "land banking" used by Earthbound corporations to maintain monopolistics positions — I might imagine melting metals to lose heat (which would largely be through the the metal's specific heat) might not be as efficient as using the latent heat of vaporisation of water.
The work required to raising the temperature of the data centre's low temperature reject heat to vaporise (or just melt) Tungsten(W) might not be worth the candle.
I suppose a million such satellites each discharging tonnes of water vapour into LEO might either bugger the climate further or fix it but the former would favourite if it is anything Musk has a hand in.
(This ignores the logistics of delivering whatever selected sacrificial coolant into LEO. Giant, pointy, rocket shaped blocks of very cold ice ?)
I thought that was either a typo for "factually" or a backhanded way of saying barefaced.
But according to the freedictionary's legal dictionary "face" is a US legal term that indicates:
The words contained in a document in their plain or obvious meaning without regard to external evidence or facts.
Presumambly akin to the legal Latin prima facie. Perhaps "facie imperfecta."
So Amazon is claiming SpaceX's application, like Musk himself, is defective and totally without merit.
"The Register has over the last two years repeatedly asked Citrix and XenServer for a briefing on product direction and strategy, without success."
I suppose they will eventually get back to you once they actually have a direction or a strategy with or without a product.
