Posts by Bebu sa Ware

Debian goes retro with a spatial desktop that time forgot

a "roll up" button

Window title bars are sparse too. There's a close box at the right end, as is fairly standard these days. On the left are two buttons we see much less. The leftmost is a "roll up" button

I first encountered that with OpenLook which supports maximize, iconize, close and roll up — configurably. After accidentally closing a window once too often I exiled the close button to the the top left corner and the iconize, maximize and roll up to the right hand corner. I find the roll up feature quite useful for text windows displaying man pages, configuration and header files, etc. — easier than searching for the right icon on the taskbar/panel (tint2.)

Curious: what is the second button of which we see much less "On the left are two buttons we see much less." ? Resize ?

Very tough microbes may help us cement our future on Mars

Re: A future mystery

Might also apply to the Earth once we really screw up this planet - especially if the AI janitors clear away the bones.

"we'd either have died out or will have had a better idea."

I just cannot see the second disjunct getting up, can you ?

Syonara I guess.

Re: urea

For the mausoleum of first Martian Emperor, Elon I, I would be delighted to donate a bottle of urea rich solution.

Artificial brains could point the way to ultra-efficient supercomputers

The universe IS analogue - … - it simply IS, immediately and without processing delay

I wouldn't bet the farm on that proposition especially "immediately and without processing delay."

How much the Universe "just is" at the smallest conceivable scales is a fairly decent headache for theoretical physicists and philosophers, I suspect.

As far as I can see analogue computers — using charge, current, emf and capacitance,resistance and inductance as proxies for other physical properties that share the same differential equations — are just as remote from reality as a digital computers applying the same differential equations either symbolically or numerically.

Quantum computers with their complement of qubits would presumably count as analogue computers in some sense. Superposition would seem like reality indulging in speculative execution. ;)

NASA decides to bring Crew-11 home early after astronaut health scare

just looking at the picture of the crew

I can imagine one reason why the mission might be terminated in which case I can imagine the anxiety of the affected crew member.

Sometimes above all the shit flying around, common humanity elicits good will towards the stranded and imperilled.

Most devs don't trust AI-generated code, but fail to check it anyway

6%/48%/46%

I would bet once the he 6% retire a goodly proportion of the 48% (the creme) will take an early mark and head for the same exit.

"we are on the verge of a crisis..." An understatement if the result is 0%/20%/46% ie normalized 0%/30%/70%

A third knowing just enough to cause real damage with remaining two thirds are too ignorant to know that they have already inflicted mayhem.

Aye. It's a grand time to be leaving the world… or waiting for the gangplank to be lowered for embarkation. ;)

How hackers are fighting back against ICE surveillance tech

Re: Regardless of one's views…

…on immigration, or the irony of a bunch of Europeans that showed up on boats now claiming the land as "theirs", it seems clear that this is what the collapse of an empire (albeit a very short lived one) looks like. ✓

Shame they didn't get their arses handed to them by the Skraelings as I think Leif Erikson's was in Vinland much earlier.

When a majority cease thinking of themselves as American — first and foremost — the collapse will be rapid, possibly rivalling that of the former USSR. I suspect the Roman Empire endured partly because it was fundamentally inclusive which the US, despite the mountains of bullshit to the contrary, is not.

CES 2026 worst in show: AI girlfriends, a fridge that won't open unless you talk to it, and more

Re: Sometimes you have to

Just ordered a kilo of Lapsang Suchong. That comes in a sealed pack, and goes into a sealed container from where it is metered out to a handy jar for daily use.

The Chinese take their tea seriously. I recently purchase some Taiwanese Oolong which basically came sealed in a doubly sealed tin — I have seen hazardous reagents stored less securely. :)

I don't like tea much — Oolong is the exception, but baggies (used tampons as my brother tastefully put it) are so un-tea-like that with lashings of milk aren't too bad for a change but don't ever make the mistake of trying to drink it black.

Re: Lepro AMI

'Lepro Ami AI "Soulmate." '

Being on the article's sidebar my eye caught it as "Leprous Ami AI Cell·mate" which if it hooks into xAI/grok might not be too far from the truth in the UK.

CES 2026 — I have seen the future…

are the Amish still taking applications ?

"AI girlfriends, a fridge that won't open unless you talk to it"

Good thing the sub·ed didn't get "girlfriends" and "fridge" the other way round. ;)

Actually do Brits and/or left pondians refer to refrigerators as "fridges" ? I thought it was an Australian·ism; Kiwi do or did once refer to them as '"refs"

When I think about it, an AI boyfriend† might be a more practical proposition and more saleable as most boyfriends aren't much more complicated than a sextoy imbued with modicum of first generation AI… or so I have been told.

_{† for the ladies… otherwise a whole different ball game.}

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

Re: consumers are returning to physical media like CDs

"My LP collection grew +2 …Not listened to a CD in years."

Still dragging a bit of rock along the fragile grooves in a disc of dodgy plastic with an expensive scratch·o·matic phonograph ? How Flintstones !

_{As the older woman in the music store said when I pooh·poohed the renaissance of the vinyl: "It keeps me in a job". — chacun à son goût}

Grok told to cover up as UK weighs action over AI 'undressing'

Re: Poppers Paradox

A fact is a fact.

Curiously Popper might have contended that a fact is only a fact and not just a belief, if it is amenable to disproof.

_{"a fact is a fact" is clearly a tautology but the nature of a fact cf a belief, is presumably the former's vulnerability to empirical testing.}

Re: Poppers Paradox

✓ For the reference to the 20th century philosopher Karl Popper — whose experience of fascism cannot be discounted.

I assume the paradox is stated in his The Open Society and Its Enemies.

poor old spinster, Ms Miggins, 92 years old

I would rather have the constabulary turn up at chez Mary Whitehouse (alas long deceased.)

Although It would be a braver chap than most, to attempt to sick Grok on Ms Whitehouse's image.

I do get a laugh out of imagining a whiskery old Tory contemplating the Iron Lady in a micro bikini—not that the old codger would have a clue about grok, computers, … or anything really.

Nothing to declare at border control except a Windows 7 certificate error

"best to stand in Schrodinger's queue"

but avoid standing next to his cat.

Tech that helps people outshone overhyped AI at CES 2026

tech can be more than just privacy invading, soul destroying, and enshittified experiences.

perhaps, but unfortunately the ROI won't be as spectacular so those who have a rational requirement for the tech are doomed to sit in a public square, on a steaming pile of shit and bereft of a soul. Unaccountably many amongst the polloi mistake this for their moment in the shit sun.

Disappointed…

I came here looking for the "AI toothbrush that sends their gums to the cloud."

Would make an ideal gift for quite a few people I know who are already wallowing in the cesspit of AI daftness..

Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem

routers' clocks were out by an hour… change to daylight saving time.

Seems a bit suspect as the routers would use UTC I would have thought.

Possibly someone had fiddled with the system (UTC) clock to get the "right" local time rather than set the correct time zone. I have seen this and it is bloody irritating once you tumble to it.

Boffins probe commercial AI models, find an entire Harry Potter book

I can believe it

When I was in school I had a friend who could recite verbatim the dialogue from every movie he ever watched. It didn't seem like copyright infringement and at the time was mostly entertaining.

Years ago I watched two pre school age kids (being baby·sat by my brother and GF) watching afternoon TV speaking the lines of M.A.S.H. about 15·20 seconds before the actors. Decidedly creepy. Apparently they did the same with I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched and I would guess Green Acres and Petticoat Junction — this stuff is/was repeated ad nauseam in the kids' time slot. I would have loved to hear the kids do Eva Gabor… perhaps not.

I sometimes wonder what became of those two tots… for my own sanity, not too deeply nor too often.

Re: Can it improve the Harry Potter books?

I doubt AI now and in the forseeable future could improve in a literary sense on any writing except, perhaps the very worst which Rowling's works definitely aren't.

I watched the first film long before I read the text. I was impressed by the extremely effective use of special effects to portray "magic" on screen. I was more impressed by the stories getting a whole cohort of children reading and actively using their imaginations. Mind you this was before smart phones and ipads.

When I eventually read the text I was struck how derivative the material was and the fairly ordinary writing. The source material has been repeatedly mined by innumerable authors — C S Lewis, J R R Tolkien and more tongue·in·cheek Terry Pratchett to name but a few — so really only an observation rather than a criticism. The sophistication of the writing is admittedly targeting a juvenile readership and given its obvious success in this, I would not complain.

I think the sense of not really getting much idea of what magic was or wasn't in the Harry Potter world was one of the more unsatisfying aspects. Contrast with Pratchett's Discworld where the nature of magic in that world is slowly revealed and how it interacts with people etc

Send in the Dementors !

They can permantly corral the whole grifting AI crew in Azkaban for my money.

OpenAI putting bandaids on bandaids as prompt injection problems keep festering

Re: Idiots

"They are not idiots, but they are conmen."

I suspect most majored in both (graduating summa cum stultitiaque avaritia — from Trump U ?)

Logitech macOS mouse mayhem traced to expired dev certificate

Re: Coupling

I know Agile develoment can work well if done properly, I've just never seen it done properly, ever.

Like magick then ? Just more toads.

UK to spend £23M on AI to tell benefit claimants where to go

"to tell benefit claimants where to go"…

This AI bucket of slop will undoubtedly be named after the fabled destination of "Buggaree" ?

AI's grand promise: Less drudgery, more complexity, same (or lower) pay

"handling complex tasks while simultaneously exerting downward pressure on compensation"

Which part of the inviolable law of economics regarding monkeys and peanuts did these genius MBAs not understand ?

One imagines these fools would opt for the cheaper nearly qualified brain surgeon to excise their brainstem tumour — sadly I really think they would.

What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

Home, Pro, Enterprise ad naus.

I suppose the comparable commercial offering might be Complete, Total and Tax-deductible Loss^® ?

The idea of a cutdown kernel with just enough to support the hardware (or virtual environment) and the application(s) isn't particularly novel. I vaguely recall a cutdown Linux(?) kernel: Rump kernel (?) I think might have done the same.

With the same goal — running Windows binaries on an alternative platform — I might have started with a microkernel but I imagine in practice Linux is second not even to Windows for the breadth of the hardware that it supports.

Fundamentally the question going forward is whether anyone would want to run Microsoft slop ? If not how far would ISVs as fellow travellers, go on that road to slopdom ? I suspect if a mostly compatible, stable but slopfree platform were (freely) available ISVs might use that as their primary target abandoning Microsoft to perish in their own sloppy quagmire.

If Loss32 were basically freeware, large ISVs might license a runtime version to include with their tat: Abōdé Quaint now with free Loss support !

A the dawn of the age, early Windows (2.0) applications did ship with a Windows runtime (eg Whitewater group's Actor †) but I vaguely recall Microsoft took Windows runtimes around the back of the barn well before Win 3.0 but did offer a discounted upgrade to retail Windows.

_{† A really interesting system that actually worked but with the limitations of Windows (partly due to Microsoft skulduggery) it was difficult to build competitive applications. I know. I tried. Fool me once MS…}

Humongous 52-inch Dell monitor will make you feel like king of the internet with four screens in one

Re: Meanwhile, on top of Great A'Tuin...

Thanks. I had almost forgotten that... insight #1

https://www.juanjacquesjacobs.com/post/terry-pratchett-7-insights-from-a-famous-author

Given the sheer volume of his output it is a wonder that he didn't wear out the alphabet. :)

EU won't scrap tech regs just because Washington dislikes them

why not conjugate the verb "to rendition"

I am not a fan of US pidginization (sic) of English, but a model conjugation might be to condition which as an intransitive verb is attested in the 15th century. (Merriam Webster.)

The process of creating a pidgin is uncomfortably close to creating an Orwellian Newspeak — Eric Blair must be turning, nay spinning, in his grave if he were aware that his dystopian warnings were scripting the first quarter of the the 21st century. :(

Sobering to recall that in the short period between June 1914 and June 1919 the then unthinkable happened—great empires, some centuries old, disintegrated. A mere five years with little or no contemporary intimation of the oncoming catastrophe. History is as much a warning as it is a lesson.

Careful... that could be construed as a war crime....

The US "doesn't do" the ICC† nor a host of other ratified conventions like UN Law of the Sea so probably not a grave risk.

As if Crapita could be approach anything as offensive as native trumpisstani shite.

† One of the reasons Madame et M. George Clooney are now French citizens.

Congress ctrl-Zs bulk of proposed cuts to NASA science

Re: Learnin' is the Devil

"dem pro fessers doin all the sciencin and the vaccinatin gonna bring the devil down on us. Save us Donald!"

Too late. I is here… the truth is I never left you — my people !

windows ctrl-z or a unix ctrl-z?

I too was wondering CP/M EOF or default Unix tty suspend binding (which sends SIGTSTP to the process group) .

If only Congress could find the testicular fortitude to send SIGSTOP, SIGQUIT or SIGTERM to the whole miserable administration. Signal #9 is too much to ask for I suppose.

Baby's got clack: HP pushes PC-in-a-keyboard for businesses with hot desks

"tiny sticks of rock"

That might be rather inpenetrable to anyone outside the UK.

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/BJFK4F/stick-of-blackpool-rock-sat-on-flat-sandy-surface-this-is-a-traditional-BJFK4F.jpg†

Living in the antipodes I have never seen this sticky confection in life but as a kid I was intrigued on how the lettering was incorporated into the length. See https://www.rocksweets.co.uk/content/6-how-rock-sweets-are-made.

† Another with a coin: https://live.staticflickr.com/4094/4753569311_2986938060_b.jpg

Dumb terminal/X workstation and log in to a session on the company server.

Security concerns might make this "old" new again.

No ports, no slots, no network … basically nothing. Just a high(ish) speed connect to the monitor — just the video (+optionally audio); the input: keyboard, mouse, microphone connect to the monitor and share the monitor connect. The components: monitor, keyboard, mouse etc all mutually identify and authenticate. Anything data·like that moves might be end-to-end encrypted.

The sessions might be persistent (like Nomachine sessions) so that moving between physical desks could be transparent and almost instantaneous (following your identity/auth token ?)

ChatGPT is playing doctor for a lot of US residents, and OpenAI smells money

Oh dear !

I have fairly frequent recourse to searching for medical information mostly NIH, FDA and CDC stuff and journal articles† and am often horrified by the sheer wrongedness of the gratuitous summary provided with the search results.

If residents start basing their diagnoses and treatment on the great slop it might ultimately be safer DIY with a copy of the Merck Manual (the incomparable resource for the incurable hypochondriac.)

_{† Definitely not for self consumption—the graveyards are notoriously and prematurely filled by the self·diagnosed.}

"One man's failing healthcare system is another man's opportunity"

The funeral director comes to mind as the obvious beneficiary.

UK injects just £210M into cyber plan to stop Whitehall getting pwnd

stop Whitehall getting pwnd

In reading the pwnd I took for proned rather then "owned."

In the first reading—pretty much a lost cause since Profumo, I would have thought.

While the fact the UK government is owned is not much disputed; the identity of who actually owns it has its various proponents but a consortium of unscrupulous albeit incompetent interests would have to be favourite.

Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

IMAPery...

This kerfuffle reminded me ~20 years ago of an emeritus academic whose incoming email traffic was prodigious - vastly exceeding his local storage allocation.

His archiving solution was to successively open gmail accounts and manually copy his "work" email into the current gmail account until the gmail gratis quota was reached.

I probably saved the equivalent a few of his remaining years by pointing him the direction of an imap tool that would copy the new email in his local account to his current gmail dumpster. The tool wasn't fetchmail but I imagine it is just the sort thing it would excel at.

Since then disk store has become so cheap and plentiful and no one would bother with such shenanigans.

The last supported version of HP-UX is no more

Re: Been a long time

"But HP chopped up memory into chunks." — called quadrants. A perl based front end to [k]adb was called "q4" presumably from that."

Some of the gory details are covered in hp-ux 11i internals (1st edition) Chris Cooper & Chris G. Moore (Prentice Hall 2004) which is an interesting read two decades later when both the architecture, PA-RISC 2.0, and finally the OS, HP·UX11, have been consigned to history.

"Support without Sustaining Engineering through at least 31-Dec-2028" is rather intimidating when I consider I am also on the same conveyor belt of obsolescence.

Re: It will be missed

"it was weird and it required more hacks than aix, Solaris, or irix."

The HPUX Software Porting and Archive Depot (from memory) was your friend if you wanted gnu software — gcc for starters — but a fair bit of other open source software too.

For my sins I worked for roughly a decade in an environment where I was responsible for workstations running a variety of versions of decosf/1 (digital unix, tru64), hpux, irix, sunos (solaris) and aix. The only obvious commonality was they all supported NIS (YP) and NFS. Every version supported at least two file systems and no two bsd ufs derived file systems were compatible.

Some of the oddness was due to the OSF — UNIX International split. DECOSF and HPUX10 had a fair bit in common, while Solaris and Irix shared some commonality.I think only Solaris2 was a system V.4 derivative; hpux10, irix were System V.3; Aix was System III?; DECOSF had a Mach foundation but looked like System V + BSD (which could be said of most Unices.)

Still open source software was rather portable between various Unices - unheard of in other OS. I had ssh v1 running on all the boxen long before any vendor support . When much later postfix appeared, sendmail was quickly consigned to history. ;)

One thing I remember was once you got down to the command line utilities (required for scripting) a lot of the differences were mostly cosmetic.

In the event over a period of two years all the Unix boxen were replaced by inexpensive, faster x86 Linux systems. I still have collection of OS and software cdroms for hardware now only found in a museum or landfill.

Re: Calculators

Don’t they still make some decent calculators or have they died a death too?

I purchased a RPN HP35s perhaps +15 years ago was definitely "Hecho en China." Still going strong so fairly decent build quality.

According to wikip. production was discontinued in 2021 but the calculator store still lists them at €45 ex. + shipping.

Probably easier these days to install a HP calculator emulator on your phone — just about every model is available either gratis or for a few dollars.

I have Free42 (HP 42s emulator) on mine as it has similar layout to the 35s but mostly because I am cheap.†

_{† more a matter of not sharing any financial details whatsoever with Apple or Alphabet.}

Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

Re: No, no, no!

"Amen! There is always something better to do than watch tv."

Anything at all is always better to do than watch tv.

The codswallop shovelled out today's broadcast television would make face painting with fresh dog turds more attractive and arguably more worthwhile.

Capita tells civil servants to wait for chatbots to fix pension portal woes

Crapita was "working tirelessly to deliver the [crapita] experience"

Doubtless.

Palo Alto Networks security-intel boss calls AI agents 2026's biggest insider threat

Even before the advent of the current AI madness…

Palo Alto edge devices gave me the security heebie-jeebies^†. I don't doubt these horrors will be upgraded to incorporate lashings of AI sauce. Lay down misère—losing every security trick but a winning hand in these irrational times.

_{† a technical term we professionals use to describe our being frightened fæcesless.}

Re: just madness

"Yes Minister with guns."

That's pretty much a description of left pondian politics I would have thought.

Imagining a demented murcan Jim Hacker clone running amok with a machete.

New Zealand orders review into ManageMyHealth cyberattack

Re: we recommend following online safety best practices

"I for one make sure to opt out of Australia's national health records database as I could see something like this happening a mlle off."

Opted out at its launch years ago. Prior to the launch there were dire warnings from experts that the data security was woefully inadequate.

Whether the situation ever improved I don't know but apart from an impressive talley of vaccinations there wouldn't be much of mine that would interest anyone even if I were to have a record.

(The vaccination register is separate entity, I think. Pretty secure-even I couldn't get a copy of my record during covid. ;)

Techie turned the tables on office bullies with remote access rumble

"students torturing C++ or vice versa."

Substituting Rust for C++ you could remove one of the disjuncts and save an 'or.'

I would not presume to suggest which disjunct might be omitted. ;)

_{Linux (and Unix) boxen within Universities only have crap security when the institution has dispensed with the services of a (competent) system administrator or have never availed themselves of the same. A remote login shutting down a Linux host would normally require root from sudo etc or a dodgy auth/policy configuration. An unprivileged user logged in to the console is normally and reasonably permitted to shutdown but care has to be taken with remote session software like Nomachine on a shared multiuser box . [Don't ask.]}

Bitfinex crypto thief who was serving five years thanks Trump for early release

Re: Amazing, "And the US wonders why the rest of the world hates it."

I was always hoping that it was actually a case of "the US doesn't care the rest of the world hates it."

But the awful truth is that vast majority of the US polloi are either too ignorant or too stupid (mostly both) to understand that there exists a "rest of the world" that is both distinct and independent from the US.

Presumably these dullards have a vague idea that there is some sort of terra nullius just beyond their immediate ken that is awaiting—or has been deprived of—the incomparable benefits of "American Civilisation" and in the meantime this imaginary wasteland is held responsible for the manifold home·grown ills afflicting the US.

.

Re: Share and share alike

"Donald the Dull has already received his cut. The pardon would never have happened otherwise."

True. As I understand, credit isn't normally extended in a brothel.