Posts by Bebu sa Ware

LibreOffice learns to speak Markdown in version 26.2

Wants and needs

Marketer 1 wants the font size increased by 0.5 pt and moved 3mm left.

Marketer 2 wants the font size decreased by 0.5 pt and moved 3mm right.

Marketeers 1&2 need… who's got the bat? … knocked sideways into the middle of next week sounds about right. They'll be seeing double so they can have both 3mm left and right and having enough trouble focusing on the typeface without worrrying about half a point either way.

My experience of these types faffing about with Word, Pagemaker, Framemaker etc informs me these clowns know something between diddly and squat about typesetting and have little appreciation for an expertly typeset page.

RSS dulls the pain of the modern web

Re: Liferea

A pun on the German for 'delivery' perhaps?

Given its pronounciation I thought it might be the Australian for a press officer or marketing executive viz (we) lie fer ya.

The public broadcaster ABC.net.au canned it rss news feeds last year I think. I actually thought rss had long gone to into the internet hereafter.

Perhaps a clever chap might use a LLM to create an application to digest web sites to extract salient information and create rss feeds from such information (if any.)

Palantir’s lethal AI weaponry deployed to find chairs for US government staff

For the chap…

who does the ploughing/plowing on a USDA research farm, one hopes that the "seeing stones" allocate him a seat on his tractor.

I imagine even quite large organisations still manage seat allocation without the assistance of software otherwise they would lose the the spectacle of the recurring spats of who gets the window seats. :)

Operations Research has been a thing since WW2 and optimum and optimal resource allocation is its stock·in·trade. The tools for allocating seating probably exist in Dartmouth BASIC and Fortran·IV mouldering in some ancient DECUS archive.

Britain spends £180M to work out what time it is

From my experience most bus services everywhere…

could run on sundials for their scheduling.

The bus on a local service has a display screen for the route and upcoming stops which displays UK civil time and a route somewhere near London which is dandy but for the fact the bus is on the other side of the planet.

Unlike most of the local services it is runs mostly on time and the time on the screen is correct within a second once the timezone and UK summertime offset are taken into account — I suppose it is the stopped clock principle at work (when all the forces of fuckedness converge on a point even the totally broken works.)

Murcan Anguish: Hale Cesium ? or Heil Kaiserium ? Stopped clocks ?

Washington reportedly moves to tighten leash on AI chip exports

Re: It would be better if they extended the law to ban exporting of all things “AI”

Banning "All things US" would have to be favourite in the circumstances.

America has the hallmark of a sorority of spiteful bimbos trying to run a nuclear power station (a Chernobyl clone at that) while actively engaged in scratching each others eyes out. Rivers of blood and tears long before the end,

Unpacking the deceptively simple science of tokenomics

Darkness, Brightness…

and Eliot Ness ?

All this nessiness could quickly become ineffable or at least untouchable.

Daftness pretty much encompasses the whole boiling.

WTF is "Goodput"?

Didn't Musk christen one of his spawn "TPS$W Goodput" ?

As for the meaning I can only imagine the "put" derives from the French la pute.

Microsoft finally gets around to fixing Windows 10 Recovery Environment after breaking it in October

Just yesterday

I saw a massive road side displaying the failed recovery screen.

As Effie would have said "How embarrassment."

The Bork fairy or is that the Bjork fairy ? :) In one of her more outlandish costumes a fair personification of the former.

Brits fear AI will strip the human touch from public services

not a single one will transform government's cost base...

"not a single one will transform government's cost base... There's a naive techno-utopianism in Whitehall."

Possibly truer that "There's a naive techno-utopianism in Westminster" with a large helping of desperation from a typical UK government totally out of its depth trying to deal with 21st century problems with a 19th century mindset and matching administrative apparatus.

You cannot entirely fault civil servants - senior or other otherwise - for drinking the ministers' lemonade (even if the wiser heads unobserved tip that hemlock into the potted aspidistra); it's either that or the labour exchange and the joys of Universal Credit.

worried that AI will dehumanize public services

Even further.

Firefox taps Anthropic AI bug hunter, but rancid RAM still flipping bits

Re: alternative truth

Would be interesting to trap SIGV and look at the faulting address. If a bit is flipped in the lower 48 bits there is a fair chance it points to valid address space but in the upper 16 it is likely a bit flip or a programmer playing silly buggers with uint64 and pointers.

The processor should raise an exception if the upper 16 bits don't replicate bit 47 but I am not clear what the particular exception would be. I understand later processors are a bit more flexible optionally allowing the use of the 16 bits for tags etc.

Bit flip rate

Years ago I had a fleet of DEC alphas logging centrally and I saw roughly one (corrected) memory error per day over a combined decent gigabytage.

Most were fairly randomly between machines but perhaps at most once a week I would see a cluster of errors simultaneously on multiple machines which I would ascribe to a cosmic ray shower.

At the time I thought your typical whitebox PC was completely vulnerable to these ram errors although their limited memory likely reduced the risk but today a modest PC would have 16G, could have 32G or even 64G which isn't generally isn't ecc.

Linus has been railing about this for yonks — I think building a full Linux kernel on a non·ECC ram machine has a fair chance of crashing with a ram bit error.

Add the general enshittification of… pretty much everything really and the incentives to ship substandard or faulty or counterfeit ram, today your PC might be lucky to get through a Win11 boot without BSODding.

Presumably cosmic ray showers would also affect the now somewhat larger CPU chips which I suppose don't generally don't support on·chip error detection.

Oracle and OpenAI's Texas Stargate datacenter expansion reportedly on the skids

Completely B-Ark.

Ford: "Fiscal policy! How can you have money, if none of you actually produce anything – it doesn’t grow on trees you know."

MC: "…since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt leaves as legal tender we have of course all become immensely rich"… "[to] effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on an extensive defoliation campaign and, … burn down all the forests. I think that’s a sensible move, don’t you?"

Except our AI circus clowns are going one better and want to burn the whole planet.

Ford: "You’re absolutely barmy, you’re a bunch of raving nutters." — Indeed !

Asteroid 2024 YR4 won't smack Moon in 2032, boffins confirm

when they come at us from a sunward direction.

A variation of a warning I read at school in in Douglas Bader's Reach for the Sky — "Beware the Hun in the Sun."

US state laws push age checks into the operating system

Tell me, which books can you no longer buy on Amazon?

I have found quite a few. But they have been out of print - in many cases longer than they were in copyright - and no digitised version yet exists.

I haven't noticed any censorship but I neither reside in the US nor likely to be seeking the subject matter of a censored title.

Even if Amazon itself doesn't stock the title there are a large number of used·book vendors from all over the planet that sell through Amazon and with reasonable certainty from at least one such vendor the title could be purchased.

people who never got beyond "Hot or not? Swipe left or right.".

Just looking the paradigms of US culture like the Kardashians, I would say that just another thing murcans got completely wrong.

(I am embarrassed to admit that I have no idea which way one swipes for "hot." I only know about the K's from an extended stay in a dentist's waiting room and being forced to read a "women's magazine" having exhausted the thirty year old Nat. Geogs.)

Don’t blame AI yet for poor jobs numbers, analysts say

shed 92,000 when expected to add 50,000

"shed 92,000 jobs in February, a dramatic downturn from analyst expectations that it would add about 50,000 jobs."

To my mind that is a shortfall of 142,000. The 50,000 not employed plus 92,000 that lost their employment.

Generally an economy has to continuously add jobs to maintain a constant (un)employment rate to account for the increase in the working age population and changing demographics.

I guess the administration might be recruiting for this season's world series wars. The persian away game looks like promising way of reducing the working age population unemployment in the US.

Trump administration spoiling for a fight over global satellite regulations

Re: Clearly doesn't understand "fair"

"a fair shake in Europe."

I am sure orange reprobate would quickly unzip for "a fair suck of the sav."

You can power a G-Wiz EV with 500 vapes, and this YouTuber proved it

"the mountains of trash"

I was wondering where he got the 500 vapes from?

If he had puffed his way through the 500 he would have been better advised to concentrate on a vape powered mobility scooter as he would likely be totally knackered in a couple of years.

Given the photo shows a healthy young chap I guess he must have raided the vape trash mountain.

Back in the early noughties these abominations (then called e·cigarettes) could have been banned outright and the Australian Medical Association (AMA) was demanding this, but the particular numpties in government at that time declined to act. Ironically at that time the tobacco lobby was also calling for a ban but quickly changed their tune when realized they already had the sales channels.

MoJ puts Prisoner Telephony Service replacement on hold yet again

The Home Office … not fit for purpose.

Probably not clear to anyone in the first instance what that purpose might be (or those purposes.) The Minister (Home Secretary) possibly being amongst the most confused but those in the previous government weren't particularly fit for any purpose themselves.

Prisoner Telephony

I was reminded of the peculiar L shaped cordless phones in the 1967·68 TV series "The Prisoner." Of course Nº 6 had far fewer approved numbers than these inmates.

Installing phones in the cells is a new take on "cell phone."

Supposedly big-brained execs are outsourcing decisionmaking to AI

Re: AI is the modern equivalent of astrology

"they can't make any decisions without consulting their AI"

Consulting fresh chicken entrails would have to be more reliable.

(Bonus: fried chicken for dinner.)

You may have seen this movie before

Favourite has to be Management Information Systems (MIS) and the responsible IT managers aptly titled MIS·Managers. Around 1980s.

Clearly these big·brained executives are sniffing the C-suite fumes.

62% brain dysfunction aligns with the Gartner report that put middle managers at 46% and grunts at 26%.

AI doctor's assistant is easily swayed to change prescriptions, give bad medical advice

The graveyards are full of people…

who have met an early demise from self diagnosis and Dr Google but I think Doctronic is an even faster shortcut into the hereafter.

If it came down to the choice between this electronic Mengele and giving it a go myself, I know which I would choose.

Re: False sense of security

> "about as reliable as a dowsing-rod"

"I asked them to explain the science behind them"

It's the Ley lines, of course.

Ask a silly question - like asking for the science behing whatever "magick" the nutter is currently deluded with.

AI is just that kind of magic.

Apple's budget-friendly MacBook Neo is bursting with color and compromise

AUD897.00 for an Apple logo ;)

I recall back in PowerPC days grabbing a silver Apple logo stick·on that came with a user's high end titanium macbookie thingy - the knee cooker model (from memory. )

Just for he hell of it, I stuck the logo on to the lid of a Toshiba laptop that was born crappy and went on to be unusable. Possibly a little morphic resonance between that Toshiba craptop and Apple's Neo - branding is a powerful and insidious force… for enshittification.

HR may have to cajole and soothe reluctant employees to get them to use AI

46% and 26%

"46 percent of managers are experimenting with AI to improve their work, compared to just 26 percent of employees."

Seems about right for the effectiveness reality perception filter (and coefficient of gullibility.)

About a quarter of the grunts are gullible enough to drink the managements' lemonade which completely buggers their reality perception circuits.

Half of line and middle management would not be able to find their way home and have difficulty with object permanance.

Anyone downwind, within sniffing distance of the C-suite (which seems to include CHROs—both the acronym and role are corporate abortions) is living in La·La Land completely detached from reality.

The current AI mania makes this quite clear.

And Gartner wins another STBBO award…

"Just as asking IT professionals to train their overseas replacements risks rebellion, urging employees to embrace AI coworking can create pushback, especially if accompanied by layoffs."

No shit Shertlock.

I am certain Gartner long ago earned a lifetime "Stating the Bleeding Bloody Obvious" award for their consistent disservices to IT.

Once upon a time, saving your bits meant punching holes in floppies

create a "flippy disk,"

I think the 3.0 inch diskettes used by early Amstrad (Z80/CP/M) machines were by design "flippy" disks.

They must have had two separate right·protect tabs - one for each side.

I vaguely recall that I could attach these drives to a MSDOS 3.x PC and read and write the disks. A useful Aussie DOS program at that time, PC-Alien, could read just about any DOS or CP/M format.

Gram: Zed, but with AI and chat features removed

"Talking to LLM bots can be hazardous for your mental health."

Once one starts talking to LLM bots, I would say that horse has already bolted.

Not many years ago anyone observed talking to inanimate objects (and expecting an answer) would universally have been considered completely doolally. Even today I think that conclusion is inarguably sound.

If I start holding deep and meaniful conversations with my Vi/Vim editor I expect and hope to be carted off to the funny farm. Although I suspect Emacs users are probably in their element.

MIT boffins aim to build injectable mini-organs that can fill in for a damaged liver

"how these mini-organs are integrated…"

I was wondering about this too.

The full paper on cell.com is linked† in the article. A quick look seems to me that the point was more to test whether their microgel spheres would keep the liver cells (hepatocytes) and connective tissue [precursor] cells (fibroblasts) in place long enough for these cells to construct an organ·like structure and for the host's tissues to grow new blood vessels into that structure.

Seems that all that did happen in their mice experiments.

The liver is an amazing organ and fortunately extremely resilient. Just shoving a number of possibly quite specialized liver cells into an artificial structure is never likely to replicate anything like the full range of liver function.

Given brainworm bobby and his nogoods at Health and Human Services have poo·poo-ed neonatal hepatitis B immunisations, artificial livers might be in some demand by Americans in the decades ahead. Clearly the pressing need currently is for functional brains of any kind.

_{† https://www.cell.com/cell-biomaterials/fulltext/S3050-5623(26)00034-6}

Facebook went down for about three hours, interrupting your poking and Meta's ads business

Wrong Image for Article ?

I might have thought every second the planet is spared this blight would deserve a thumbs up; not a thumbs down.

Microsoft reportedly eyes E7 tier to make AI agents pay their way – like the humans they'll replace

Re: Agent 365

I was thinking a latter day Control Agent a sucessor to Agent 86 but never likely to get smart. Definitely "a deadly out-of-control pathogen."

Bootleg Windows, Office scheme crashes, triggers 22-month lockup for Florida woman

MS want people to think their software is somehow “special”..

Definitely "special"

Re: People will buy Microsoft Certificate of Authenticity stickers?

I normally stick them on rubbish bins, along with "Designed For Microsoft Windows" labels

Probably the best place for them.

All our DELL PCs came with the Win7 PRO sticker attached but given they were never going to run microslop I used to remove those stickers a keep them in an envelope. Turned out quite useful later when installing Win10 on the odd VM. Still have dozens of the now useless stickers. The original PCs would now be ewaste.

Reading the indictment Heidi appears to have paid $20-80 per COA (Windows, Office) so if you say $50 per COA so $5m works out to at least 100,000 COAs. It isn't clear how much her clients paid for licenses but $242,000 restitution was sought.

Doesn't seem too profitable on the face of it. I would wonder whether her operation was mostly a front for "unindicted co·conspirator 1" from whom she appeared to purchase the COAs.

Claude having artificially intelligent hiccups and access lockouts for over two hours

"developers must … actually write some code"

Could be perilous. Actual Code.

Qualcomm, Nvidia ready for 'AI-native' 6G, if only the world knew what it was

"AI-native, open, secure and trustworthy platforms"

Pick one and hope for the least worst outcome.

"Open" possibly has the fewest death traps but open as in "open wound" also comes to mind.

Generic methods arrive in Golang, but they weren't the top dev demand

Re: Here we "go" again...

I always think when better known languages engage in a little argy·bargy over generics and polymorphism, that Bertrand Meyer's Eiffel has been doing both since almost forever.

There was a cartoon of a Unix graybeard flicking a PFY a coin saying "here's a dime kid - get yourself a proper OS." (More or less.)

A smug French Eiffel programmer might flick Euro to coding polloi say "here is a Euro - get yourself a proper language! †." :)

_{† If you pardon my French perhaps Prenez cet Euro et achetez un langage informatique moins merdique.}

UK government's Vulnerability Monitoring System is working - fixes flow far faster

"a new career pipeline designed to motivate security professionals"

Ian Murray—

"But technology alone isn’t enough. Today I’m launching a new government Cyber Profession to attract and develop the talented people we need to stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated threats - making government a destination of choice for cyber professionals who want to protect the services that matter most to people’s lives."

Richard Horn—

"The new government Cyber Profession is co-branded with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the National Cyber Security Centre. It will introduce a competitive total employee offer, establish a dedicated Cyber Resourcing Hub to streamline recruitment, and create a clear career framework aligned with UK Cyber Security Council professional standards."

"I thought I managed that rather well, Humphrey."

"Indeed Minister."

Windows 11 tops market share as 10 faces extended farewell

Windows 11 tops market

Right pondians might parse "tops" as a euphemism for the "long drop."

Microsoft customers doubtlessly experience the same trepidation but with each succeeding day.

OpenAI’s Altman says Pentagon set ‘scary precedent’ binning Anthropic

"No use of OpenAI technology to direct autonomous weapons systems."

Might be interesting should one of these autonomous weapons systems directed by pinky promise AI manages to destroy a major US military asset like a carrier.

Or the assets of allies. "Friends like this who needs…"

Iran all but vanishes from the global internet amid US-Israel strikes

Just Weird

and by sheer coincidence the vast majority of the Scots Nationalist cheerleading accounts on Soshal Meejah have gone silent... just like they always do when Iran shuts down internet access.

That would have to be the weirdest and probably the most innocuous conspiracy theory I have encountered in a very long time.

I cannot imagine why the Islamic Republic could give a rat's arse for the cause of Scots independence. Tbe UK is doing a fine job of fucking itself over without much assistance from the Scots (nationalist or otherwise)—the English have the job well in hand.

Re: Another war for oil

They'll be parachuting the 'crown prince' soon.

From what I was led to understand from an Iranian friend (an exile) in the 1980s that in Iran the only person that was hated more that the Ayatollah was the Shah.

In the Shah's time SAVAK would have been highly favoured for gold in the torturers' Olympics. After the revolution I don't imagine these monsters were made redundant.

I only hope the rest of world has the good sense to leave the US & Israel to slog it out with Iran unassisted, as the conflict has hallmark of a super hybrid of Iraq² and Afganistan. (Defeat and destitution — I don't mean Iran.)

Microsoft's Project Silica promises eternal storage. It can't get there from here

Glass itself is a…

I have been led to believe is a "supercooled liquid."

I don't know whether borosilicate glass is a crystalline solid or is also a supercooled liquid.

Like all fluids window glass does flow in response to gravity — very old glazing (say 100 years) is apparently thicker at the bottom than at the top.

Whether this new storage medium would also distort over hundreds of years to the point of being unreadable is a question worth asking.

Sobering to think that records made on vellum with oakgall ink have survived for around a millenium.

I suppose all the newly redundant IT professionals might be recruited as scribes into 21st century scriptoria in order to preserve our "priceless" knowledge. The supply of vellum and for that matter, oakgall might be problematic. I suppose we might as well go the whole hog and mandate goose feather quills.

SaaS-pocalypse chatter is doomster pr0n. It would be nice if enterprise IT were boring again

The whole circus is turning into one massive toss·a·thon

with legions of would be pundit pulling large audiences.

The question of course is "pulling large audiences' what?"

Server crashes traced to one very literal knee-jerk reaction

"It was the time of Novell networks, RG58 cables, and bulky tower PCs,"

Sounds like an extract from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy when:

"spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before"^†

One might wonder whether Carter was employed by the telemarketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

RG58 aka coax, thinnet, 10base2 — a whinnet·ridden^‡ technology that was a perpetual whack·a·mole of who in the coloured pencil department had disconnected their PC/Mac by unplugging the two RG58 cables (to the T-connector attached to the PC's network adaptor) from the wall and bringing their segment down.

For a fair while after 10baseT became de rigeur I still carried a couple of 50Ω terminators in my pocket. The clown that substituted 75Ω TV aerial coax (RG59) deserves, amongst other things, special mention. I never could get a coherent explanation of why or where got the cable from—not that the chap was ever distinguished by coherence at any time.

_{† Fit the Third ‡ Fit the Fourth (HHGTTG)}

Re: So, the cause was...

(resident gangly youth) RGY would be variation on PFY - the BoFH could augment his team to have both. The PFY could open the window for bit of fresh air while the RGY uses his wayward gangly limbs to propel the current stinker into the carpark.

I assume the coroner by now has a custom form for Simon's workplace.

LibreOffice Online dragged out of the attic, dusted off for another go

Re: Why? Just why?

I can only assume that by pushing the UI into a web/browser technology that the LO UI development can be offloaded on to external browser development projects. This might be driven by a graying and shrinking pool of LO developers. (I don''t know.)

Also might be driven by the declining specs in (real terms) of lower end PCs that are likely to dominate the market for some years. Running the fully local version of LO on the 2026·28 version of the "Netbook" or 4G/Celeron Chromebook might an unpleasant experience.

Or could be an outbreak of the brain liquifying daftness virus from which we appear to be suffering an epidemic.

As I have a local web server for an AL yum repo, I could test whether there is much difference between the local and web versions preferably using the same storage. I have an old, ca 2015, reflashed HP Chromebook (4G/Celeron) that now runs a lightweight Linux distro which might be a decent client side test machine. It ran Win10 like a decrepit tortoise.

Lenovo shows off snap-together laptop with removable keyboard, screen, and ports

Re: You can remove...

the effing eh-aye?

My immediate thought too.

A properly modular system you should have the option of choosing modules without AI support.

Or even choice of CPU and GPU architectures. In Wonderland the interfaces between modules would be an open spec. to which specialised third party modules might be developed.

AI models suck slightly less at math than they did last year

Re: Can confirm

Curious why the AI baulked at the bayonets.

Scottish, WW1 soldiers, charging with bayonets. — Unquestionably terrifying.

The Scots troops must have be issued with bayonets - even the Australians had them. According to my grandfather from his experience, a sharpened spade was a more effective weapon in the trenches at close quarters.