Posts by Bebu sa Ware

Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

Re: Suggestions?

I used to use a batch file eg shutdown.bat containg the cli shutdown command and a shortcut to it on the desktop.

This was a test box for checking Unix/Win interopability — years and years go possibly NT4 or 9x time.

Experiment suggests AI chatbot would save insurance agents a whopping 3 minutes a day

A Hammer Looking for a Nail…

when the whole industry is screwed.

"we believe the opportunities outweigh the obstacles" — MRDA ?

OpenAI invests in brain-interface biz co-founded by CEO Sam Altman

Mister Trooper

I always misread that as Mister Topper but the only angels these culprits are likely to encounter after his services won't have sung in the heavenly choir for aeons.

I didn't think Reacher Gilt had any real accomplices other than the Banshee.

Making Money also seems appropriate to this tribe of grifting clowns.

Having scoured the whole internet for training material…

they now want to digest through your brain.

Anyone up for this nonsense deserves having their cebral cortex liquifying and leaking out their nostrals as a consequence.

Just because Linus Torvalds vibe codes doesn't mean it's a good idea

"amateurs who wouldn't know Ada from Zsh trying to *talk* their way into good code"

Presumably they cannot use the keyboard because they find their elbows are firmly wedged up their arses.

_{amateur is (mis)used in the common modern sense of one unskilled or unprofessional rather than the literal sense of one who loves.}

Bankrupt scooter startup left one private key to rule them all

"basic ownership skill"

Interesting concept. One needs basic skills to exercise "ownership" ?

Hitherto just breathing was considered adequate.

The ventilated comatose patient retains ownership of his or her property — so even breathing, at least unassisted, also seems optional.

The whole phone app and cloud idea is a bit daft when a simple key switch has provided the same service for decades.

Just last week members of a gang half·inching high end Toyotas were apprehended in AU. They electronically unlocked the vehicles from a laptop and drove off with the vehicles — whole process taking mere seconds.

A "security expert" interviewed afterwards opined that vehicle owners would been better protected with an old school steering wheel clamp. Indeed.

Over half of AI projects are shelved due to complex infrastructure

"the economics, I think, for lots of organizations don't pencil out"

A bit like roofing a cathedral with sheets of gold — certainly keeps the elements out (and unemployed lead thieves happy) but the economics don't pencil out.

It seemed to be hinted that many organisations' existing IT isn't in a fit state to be "enhanced" with AI; often not in a fit state period; basically crap.

The automatic enshittifier that is AI cannot really perform its miracle of fecalisation if its input is already a steaming pile of turds.

BOFH: Every computer system eventually serves ads

Re: the Board members says. "That's from Hitchhiker's Guide."

You forget that he original radio play was many many decades ago when the current Board would have been impressionable Uni students

Too true.

Probably 1978 as a student I had an AM/FM radio my father had brought from HK but in AU there were no FM transmissions but one bored evening I tried the FM band just for a lark and while moving the tuning knob all of a sudden THHGTG blared out of the wireless.

What I didn't know was that one Student Union's clubs had been granted an experimental FM license and I imagine they had obtained a (pirate) tape of the BBC's transmission which they retransmitted.

I followed the whole series — I was fortunate it was the first episode I had stumbled over … kismet ?

The radio series was the definitive version for me.

"Unless one is scribbling in the margin of one's pudding"

That would have to the oddest phrase I have seen for a while.

"I have a marvellous proof (demonstrationem mirabilem) but the margin of my pudding will not contain it (hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet)."

the Board members says. "That's from Hitchhiker's Guide."

Given the history of Simon's employer it is hardly credible that any of those seat warmers would have been exposed to Douglas Adams' opus and in any case extremely unlikely to have retained anything from it.

Simon's firm is more The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul than THHGTG.

I have the impression the TTL of the current Boss is about to expire and he may soon be dropped (ex fenestra.)

"we worry about hallucinations in AI, but not world leaders"

Could easily have been lifted from Yes Minister. "Very drole, Humphrey."

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Dennis la Malice ?

Wilson, Mr Wilson ?

An engineering degree with an idiot attached is about what one might expect were Dennis the Menace to survive into adulthood.

Became a structural engineer for Boeing — I am surprised that their aircraft doors don't pop out while in flight. :)

AI may be everywhere, but it's nowhere in recent productivity statistics

Productivity ?

It wasn't clear to me from the article what particular measure of productivity was intended. The context suggests labour productivity eg GDP/hours worked/year.

(Productivity is a measure of the output for the required inputs.)

To improve labour productivity either either the output eg GDP must increase or alternatively the inputs eg hours worked must decreased.

The dream was that tech can reduce hours worked but of course tech introduced its own (skilled) labour costs so might be break even.

I would guess the introduction of PCs into the workplace had little effect on hours worked other than they were different hours worked eg typing pools vanished fairly quickly but the (steno)typists morphed into office managers, PAs and a host of other clerical roles—many created by PCs and related technology.

I suspect the 2001-2007 productivity gains were increasing contribution to GDP from the higher value Internet enabled industries and services. Ironically without the advent of ubiquitous personal computing the Internet as we know it would not have been possible (for good or ill.)

The parallel that might be applied to AI/LLM is that total hours worked are likely to remain static but change structurally so that the only prospect for increased productivity is for AI to enable or create high value services or products (which customers want and can use.)

Personally I cannot see AI producing a anything of sufficiently high value to justify the input costs.

A chilling thought is that Grok Nudify might be the zenith of high value AI services which might not be too far from the truth when you consider just how much network traffic is porn and adjacent "adult services" and how big the porn industry is.

China's Z.ai claims it trained a model using only Huawei hardware

Re: To many big words for The Don

"Keep them short like "nasty", "shithole" etc."

I had never heard of "Nano Banana Pro and searched thinking it was some bespoke Chinese hardware — it isn't — but needing small words to describe the Don reminded me of something Stormy Daniels was reported to have claimed about the Don's natural endowments… perhaps not quite a "nano" banana but definitely not going to frighten the horses.

Ofcom keeps X under the microscope despite Grok 'nudify' fix

Cold milk poured over 'spicy mode'

Sounds rather kinky.

Those living in hotter climes might be panting to be doused with le lait froid by the traditional scantily clad French maid.

Anything that gives X grief and thereby giving Musk a poke in the eye is fine by me even before examining all the issues and ramifications which no one in the UK establishment is likely to bother about before firing another blunderbuss of hasty, ill·considered regulation and legislation in the general direction of the problem.

Google offers bargain: Sell your soul to Gemini, and it'll give you smarter answers

Sell your soul ?

Anyone in the US still possess one ?

I would have thought the only buyer in the market that could both purchase and take possession of a soul would be the Devil which would imply Gemini was Satan himself or an authorised agent (in which case Mephistopheles might be a better naming choice than Gemini.)

Sort of fits with the change in direction of the corporate mission viz "Do no evil." to "Do only evil."

Maker fight! SparkFun cuts ties with Adafruit in harassment dispute

The whole world …

appears to have become incredibly antsy and bellicose.

Probably time for everyone to take a deep breath … otherwise this won't end well … tears before bedtime the least of it.

The ghastly truth is that most of these tiffs are a real distraction from the contemporary truly horrid things that ought to be confronted and combatted.

Hasta la vista! Microsoft finally ends extended updates for ancient Windows version

I recall 2008 R2

the only server version of Windows that ever dirtied my hands.

I inherited a dongle locked license server running an ancient version of Windows on an equally ancient consumer PC and was required to move it to an unused 1RU server racked in the machine room

Of course the license manager software would only run under Windows and Win7 was the then "stable" version (cf Win8) so as a naive *ix admin thought just install Win7 on the server - easey·peasy … yes… sort of but would not activate nohow noway.

The enterprise Microsoft support people were no help whatsoever (you are doing it wrong.)

Finally worked out the problem and guessed that installing a windows server OS should work and 2008 R2 seemed the best bet which it was. Installed, connected to the corporate license service and activated.

I was really surprised by how clean and fairly minimal the user interface and installed software were — a better version of Win7. :)

Never had to touch it (other than periodic updates) until decomissioned nearly a decade later. I think the ancient client application wouldn't run under the now mandated Win10 so running the license service became pointless.

Anthropic Claude wants to be your helpful colleague, always looking over your shoulder

Cow·orc ?

All the subtlety and agillity of a Jersey cow in an open plan office crossed with the congenital hatred and spite of Tolkienesque Orc ?

Hell ! I have shared office space with these cow·ork monsters long before agentic AI was even a twinkle…

Trump says Americans shouldn't 'pick up the tab' for AI datacenter grid upgrades

" … by 2030."

Seems to a popular refrain from the tech bros and AI spruikers as the chorus to :

Yes we are fucking up <whatever> to deliver <some dubious benefit> and before you get shirty

We will completely fix and improve <whatever> at no cost to you or your taxes by 2030.

… by 2030, by 2030 !

The truth is more: We will completely fuck <whatever> and by 2030 anything at all that still works will be a great improvement.

Even doggerel deserves an end rhyme and dirty shirty is all I could think of for twenty-thirty.

AI and automation could erase 10.4 million US roles by 2030

The Great Recession

Living in AU I hadn't encountered this term and the Depression was too long ago so searching I easily discovered it refers to the GFC and the ensuing economic consequences.

Apart from the long standing general dodgyness in US financial circles which precipitated the GFC I suspect there were also concurrent structural elements that led to permanent jobs losses post GFC. I would guess that the Great Recession ran up the arse of the COVID pandemic which itself crystallized pending structural changes in the US labour market.

Ultimately I would punt that AI itself won't change the US labour market and the changes that do occur will be driven by more traditional concerns with AI being both a pretext for reducing head counts and a scapegoat for when everything goes pear shaped.

Moon hotel startup hopes you get lunar lunacy, drop $1M deposit for 2032 stay

Outer Space Treaty ?

And what in the last twelve months leads you to believe that the US would adhere to the terms of this treaty any more than any other ?

Re: The moon is a harsh mistress

Some like it that way, So I believe.

Re: A bit fucking late

"Didn't you know Musk has had a colony on Mars since 2022?"

Amalgamated with the existing one founded from the Lunar NAZI base ?

GRU = Grifters 'R' Us ?

Still takes real chutzpah to ask for a $ million for possible stay in an inflatable but characteristically leaky Li·lo™ of a hotel in the utterly unforgiving lunar environment.

Admittedly there is a very long list of people who I would be more than prepared to pay $1 million to pack like Brisling sardines into a disposable rocket and launch at the Moon (or the Sun… anywhere really, just not here) but the GRU crew and any deposits will certainly have evaporated well before 2029 let alone 2032.

Actually - what would you do once you were on the Moon ? Take the totty and join the 250,000 mile high club ?

Britain goes shopping for a rapid-fire missile to help Ukraine hit back

V2 ?

The V2 warhead packed ~1000kg (1t) of explosive — I recall a tv series dealing with the Blitz where they detonated the equivalent 1t of explosive in a mock London street; the devastation was truly impressive and utterly horrifying.

The range was under 300km but I think but dropping the the warhead to 200kg might give you 500km.

I imagine mass producing 1940s rocket tech uodated with a little contemporary cost effective rocket and guidance tech could be a comparatively cheap.

Even if 95% were intercepted the remaining 5% might be ultimately unendurable.

Affordable housing site goes live with meme-laden test data

Re: Darn, they must read El Reg.

The production site seems to be up https://homes.london.gov.uk/ so perhaps the developers aren't el Rego readers after all.

Possibly they were attempting to segue from the development site to production or some such and outclevered themselves.

(Like having the work experience PFY fiddle with the DNS or the httpd.conf configuration.)

Most accurate picture of Boris so far

He looks as though he has just realized that the most important part of his anatomy (to him) has fallen off.

The whole site is probably a waste of time — affordable homes in London — hardly an oxymoron; more an outright contradiction I would have thought.

To be fair it is a global problem but in almost all cases the causes are the same: the state abandoning responsibility for social housing to "the market" around the 1980s; ensuing decades of deliberate state neglect even after it was clear "the market" had failed to deliver social (and affordable) housing on all counts; the asset bubbles driven by the GFC and then COVID with undersupply and existing or growing demand driving prices inflation for any available housing stock.

What have governments† delivered in housing policy since COVID ? Mostly cosmetic: too little, too late and largely foolish attempts to prop up the disasterous decisions of the past all the way back to the 1980s. The favourite in AU appears to be cash grants and subsidies which looks like "something is being done™ " but in reality just adds to house price inflation.

The woman to the right of Bloody Stupid extending what looks like a rather large index finger (but smeared out) says it all.

_{† of each and every persuasion (perversion) — all equally culpable on all counts.}

Mall display crashes the vibe with Windows activation nag

Slight quibble…

" Windows activation warnings tend to appear after installing the operating system or after changing specific components. A hardware-based hash is generated, and if that hash changes too much, Windows starts bleating about activation."

A (cryptographic) hash function is designed to produce a completely different result for the smallest difference in input.

So I imagine a hash of some (numerical) properties of the aggregate hardware would be vastly different after the slightest change eg adding memory to the motherboard, graphics or other card, or even moving cards between pci slots.

I have only encountered this problem when starting a VM on an image of a physical disk and that was fixed by assigning the ethernet address (mac) of the defunct physical machine to the VM. As I normally have little or nothing to do with MS tat so I concede that was probably luck or pure coincidence.

The so called hash function of the hardware would be interesting in itself as produces a measure (metric?) of by how much two hardware complements differ using the hardware's properties (or identities.)

I assume Microsoft actually just stores the concatenated (possibly hashed) identities of the distinctive hardware and when (say) 3 out of 8 change Windows blows the activation whistle. I would think (in Microsoft's case = vainly hope) that the criterion is based on weighted sum of the changes — weighted more for major components and less for minor, typically upgradeable components.

Nvidia, Eli Lilly just say yes to making drugs together, using Vera Rubin GPUs

"next miracle drug … born from AI hallucinations"

Blue pill ? Red pill ?

The ultimate hazard in this insanity is AI's hallucinations will be our hallucinations or nightmare depending the pill we choose.

Ofcom officially investigating X as Grok's nudify button stays switched on

VAWG ? Really ?

before deciding on these acronyms doesn't anyone look at adjacent acronyms — in this context I am thinking PAWG† ?

If the Brit authorities were serious about this issue and not just a rabble of self serving opportunists they would straight out ban grok, xAI, X and anything vaguely musky. Likewise with his fellow travellers.

The death of social media ? Not just a funeral I would be ecstatic about attending but one for which I would dig the bloody grave !

_{† Vamp[ish] AWG starting nice.… but "vast" or "voluminous" just easily comes to mind.}

The world is one bad decision away from a silicon ice age

Re: Why would China upset the apple cart?

Yet some in the US Governemt are saying 'Bring it on'. They have their private islands and gold reserves ready to sit it out.

If you damage any system badly enough it crosses a boundary where repair and recovery aren't possible and the system effectly dies cf cellular injury and the necrotic path.

So that might mean these reptillian dragons squatting over their hoards of gold on their private islands might ultimately be forced to ponder the edibility of gold.

The planet's supply chains, just for food, are intrinsically more fragile than possibly any other time in history.

The disruption to the global food supply resulting from a relatively limited conflict in Ukraine magnified a hundred·fold or more should terrify any rational individual.

Re: Why would China upset the apple cart?

"The US has made it patently clear since Trump II that it is NOT our [EU] ally - nor indeed anyone else's." — nor paradoxically of US itself.

If an individual behaved in the same way a the US nation state they would be considered a very sick puppy and urgently confined for their own and every else's safety.

Probably too much to hope for …

an American patriot of the calibre of old Ankh·Morpork's Suffer-Not-Injustice "Old Stoneface" Vimes to take his glaive and indulge in a little light regicide ?

Re: On a pragmatic level "learn how to … make a baby,"

Has the polloi in the US reached a level of deficiency that requires a Dummy's or Complete Idiot's guide for that ?

Not much hope then as illiteracy is the usual accompaniment to the dummy or idiot (complete or otherwise.)

How on earth did they manage to plug a charger into their phones in the past ?

Oh. Apple owners: lightening; the rest: the reason for USB-C. :)

There may be a 20-year upgrade cycle coming

The upside is that maintenance, parts recycling and repair become a thing again, which also advantages the smaller operator.

"Big Tech" is largely dependent in rapid, if largely illusory growth and expansion, to keep their dubious valuations and share price on an unsustainable upward trajectory so as to keep their marks investors throwing bucketloads of cash at their ponzi schemes.

Even a small or temporary disruption to the feedstock of this unsavoury process might well topple the largest enterprises much like Barings Bank in the wake of the Kobe earthquake. (With a little help from a chap who arguably was not too dissimilar to the drongos running big tech today.)

How CP/M-86's delay handed Microsoft the keys to the kingdom

Microsoft … NOTWorks

I recall DOS or early Windows PCs actually worked much better with AppleTalk ISA adaptors† than with MS NOTWorks.

Many environments back then were Mac + Unix so the odd PC had to connect to the network either by Apple LocalTalk (works over wet string™) or EtherTalk and there were AppleTalk to TCP/IP gateways (Webster?) as well as Apple File Sharing servers (Netatalk) that ran on Unix servers.

My unbiased‡ judgement of the last four decades is that there never was a time when Microsoft was unfucked. Always totally screwed (and their customers doubly so) to a degree that a helical spring could only envy.

_{† Farallon hardware and software. ‡ for an opinionated old git.}

CP/M·86

The only time I encountered this was on a NEC APC III but also had MSDOS 2 but the bios not being directly IBM PC compatible (the video int10 particularly) meant much MSDOS software didn't work unless it could use ansi.sys although there was a TSR that would fiddle with the interrupt vectors and emulate a PC reasonably well. The box was mainly used to run Wordstar and DBase under CP/M-86 which it did until supplanted by Wordperfect on Sperry PCs.

I think early x86 Amstrads might have run CP/M·86 + GEOS/GEM ?

The Atari ST ran CP/M-68 with the same graphical desktop I think.

I recall seeing a borked MP/M-86 PC in a bookstore (Dymocks) in the late 1990s so it wasn't an entirely mythical beast.

All pretty horrid in retrospect. Today with a flat 48 bit virtual address space and typically a minimum of 8Gb of physical memory, try telling the youth of today of your trials and tribulations with pre-80386 hardware… they won't believe you !

"handle 16 separate segments of 64 KB – for a total of one whole megabyte"

"the 8086, which, rather than being limited to 64 KB, could handle 16 separate segments of 64 KB – for a total of one whole megabyte of memory space."

Doesn't even begin to describe the fuck·up·ed·ness of the 8086/8088/80186 memory model — those "segments" had a granularity of 16 bytes ("paragraph") and could start on any paragraph and overlap any other of the four "segments."

So a given address might be represented by 2¹⁶/2⁴ 2k different segment:offset combinations.

The 80286 seemed to compound the felony but in the event was mostly used as a faster 8086 (in real mode) although you could run Windows 3.0 in 286 protected mode from memory. Minix 2.0 and Coherent 3.0 could also use protected mode.

Adding insult to injury Microsoft and Intel (asm) documentation referred to "segments" which were actually "fragments" of "groups" (addressable from a single segment register) — a "group" more closely approximating the concept of a segment in the Unix toolchain.

The documentation with Eric Isaacson's A86 assembler for MSDOS explained (I think from his time in Intel) the (ir)rationale behind some of the more dubious software design decisions.

Windows 2000 still earning its keep running a rail ticket machine in Portugal

Re: Since it runs a real parallel port ...

Mach3 CNC software that drives stepper motors direct off the parallel port ... still works perfectly 25 years on ...

Thanks.

Learnt something new.

A quick search and it is still supported after 25 years — nothing short of a miracle in today's world:

https://www.machsupport.com/software/mach3/ …… and now with no added AI ! ;)

Re: If only ....

Windows 11 was anywhere near as robust as Win 2000.

Odd you wrote that.

I remember (before SP1 I think) a notebook running w2k arrived in AU with a nasty virus/worm from the US a full 24 hours before it started knocking on the doors from the internet. Possibly the last time a 747 could outrun the internet. ;)

Fortunately we only had a few PCs running w2k — mostly win9x, me and XP. That might have been the virus that hammered our HP·UX boxes because of a DCE network port that was also used by w2k.

Re: Since it runs a real parallel port ...

Mach3

As in the CMU micro·kernel ?

Or is Mach short for machine or machining rather the the scientist and philosopher ?

Wedged by old proprietary hardware + drivers.

I was once asked to install w2k because the proprietary ISA data capture card had a binary device driver that would only work under w2k.

The owner had a hoard of old 32 bit ISA bus PCs just to keep the card and attached instrument going — cheaper than the vendor "upgrade" of a new instrument, software etc @$1 million.

Gets interesting with disks as w2k didn't natively support SATA and most of the remaining motherboards were post IDE. I suspect the user had survived until then by transferring the disk to the next functional box from the stash.

Just getting hold of a w2k install image or media in 2015 was an "interesting" exercise (not to mention the activation code.)

A Unix sysadmin's lot is not a happy one… when they run·in jobs like this.

Why the Unix chap ? "You are the only one that knows how any of this stuff actually works." — Thanks ؟ :(

_{Hint: 32 bit x86, ISA, IDE(?) boards are, or were, still manufactured for industrial (control) systems — but expensive.}

Cloudflare CEO threatens to make the Winter Olympics a political football after Italy slugs it with a fine

A Trumped Up Charge ?

Doubtless an element of that.

The USofA ain't making a whole lot of friends at the moment. The damage will take decades to remedy if ever.

Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause

Machine Room Video

A good reason for installing video camera(s) in your machine room and keeping several days' recording.

Surprising how many people have access that ought not — bloody cleaners with skeleton keys for one.

Keeps people honest and points the finger of suspicion more equitably.

A simple setup on an isolated network with a cheap Chinese cam (ethernet only) connected to a [*ix] box running VLC is cheap enough.

Google pushing Gemini into Gmail, but you can turn it off

Re: Google snippets

I'm starting to think none of the opinionated "experts" here actually use the stuff they opine about.

A bit like ketamine — most sane people, and certainly any with a skerrick of pharmocolgy would opine on the inadvisably of using the drug outside the few therapeutic indications. These opinionated "experts" are highly unlikely to have used the drug.

These "AI" applications promise to enhance a person's performance in much the same as Musk says ketamine does his. Nuff said.

sheer ballache

My brain was trying to parse that as Irish gaelic and flicked to a recollection of the activist/writer, Shere Hite from the ~1980s then unaccountably the intended meaning crystalised. ;)

"dealing with an ever-changing web interface"

That was the final straw which meant her indoors was finally prepared to move to a standalone MUA (betterbird.)

So an ill wind that has blown some good.

Also why her desktop has run ClassicShell/OpenShell from Win7 and Android tablet and phone run Nova Launcher.

The Thunderbird workflow is a little different from the GMail web interface but at least it doesn't change with each update.

China to probe Meta’s acquisition of AI outfit Manus

"domestic innovators could just abscond to the U.S."

I would imagine Singapore might be a more desirable destination than the Trumpisstani shitstorm.

Although effectively the same thing to the PRC which is a dilemma - do you raise the Bamboo Curtain restricting outward travel or even requiring Soviet style exit visas with the risk of chilling R&D in the PRC thereby encouraging early career emmigration and inhibiting skilled immigration ? - or do you wear it as an unavoidable of having a vibrant and creative R&D community ?

History would suggest the former but perhaps this time the choice will be different.

The Microsoft 365 Copilot app rebrand was bad, but there are far worse offenders

Re: Microsoft CEOs

and codswallop, bollocks, pillocks and hell all sport double ll·s too. The whole boiling might be consigned to the last location with no regrets.

This isn't the first time Microsoft has confounded loyal users.

and incontestably nowhere near the last.

I liked the first comment noting Microsoft's "coprolithication^† of f**ing everything" — ok copilotification but I will stick with my misreading.

_{† coprolith — a mass of hard fecal matter in the intestine. coprolithication — process of forming the same. Basically tough shit if you are a Microsoft customer.}