Posts by Bebu sa Ware

BOFH: If another meeting is scheduled, someone is going to have a scheduled accident

Talk about flash·backs…

"they made their own power supplies back then – huge metal boxes with a massive transformer that had about a hundred secondary taps and took up half the case." … A lot of things needed —12V back then and shunt regulators waste perfectly good electrons. Laminated steel core transformers; none of this effete woke switch mode nonsense. ;)

"the cases all had fat, chassis-mounted diodes and smoothing capacitors that filled up most of the rest of the case. And they'd always output oddball voltages, like 27.3 volts – at 87 amps."

In retrospect seem hardly credible in the age of cloudy oversell and misrepresentation that then "we did get to see the hardware, and it did what it said on the tin" even if it required a new utility substation, removing an exterior wall and hiring a forklift.

"the uninsulated mains bus that ran lengthwise down the inside of the case. Life was both simpler and cheaper back then..."—and occasionally shorter.

VMware kills vSphere Foundation in parts of EMEA

"customers moving more of their work into VMware’s remaining products"

You think ?

AI superintelligence is a Silicon Valley fantasy, Ai2 researcher says

"not because they are well founded but because they serve as a compelling narrative"

Pretty much defines any confidence tricker's stock·in·trade and just about any scam, most cults and politics universally.

Narrativium is almost as potent on Roundworld as it is on the Disc and arguably more dangerous.

Re: I keep saying this but...

"While some people did know that the Earth was in fact round they were in the minority."

I would think that the vast majority of the population at least in pre literate societies had very little idea of "the Earth" — their "world" would extend little more than a day's walk around their village which for all practical purposes was effectively flat.

Their world beyond their local environs was the cosmography of Heaven and Hell† propounded the mediaeval Church the topology of which wasn't addressed. ;)

_{† From the Inferno is clear that Dante was well aware the Earth was a sphere and quite uncontroversial.}

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Should be interesting in the brave new world…

of exclusively "agentic AI" desktop support.

I am not sure that the agent's training would encompass the user's looking at the rear of a tablet although being an Apple user would be big clue.

Perhaps the rear should be labelled: "please turn over." Apple could use the rear camera to detect their valued but gormless customer gazing at the rear of tablet and using the Siri voice synthesis capabilty gently suggest turning the device over.

I have some sympathy for the non technical polloi when faced with non obvious things.

I have to admit that I always thought selfie cameras on smart phones^† didn't mirror invert on the phone's screen until I "demonstrated" this to a non·techie with her newly acquired smartphone—très embarrassant.

A little bit of humility like crow pie goes a long way. :) [Unless it's not obvious the selfie image is not stored reversed.]

_{† I had stuck with feature phones (lacking selfie cameras) to the bitter end (finally Nokia Asha 300.)}

Trump's AI 'Genesis Mission' emerges from Land of Confusion

"comparable in scope to the Manhattan Project,"

USD 340 million for this Genesis Project is comparable with Manhattan's USD 2 billion in 1942·46 (~USD 28 billion today) ?

Trump and fellow travellers are playing with themselves. Even USD 2 trillion today would not achieve progress on the scale of the 1942 effort.

If you wanted to advance US science, one effective strategy, to start with, would be to visit each of Trump's appointees to any heath or science responsibility—with a lump hammer in hand.

US teens not only love AI, but also let it rot their brains

Re: Accademic performance?

How many minutes in a quarter of an hour. Usual college campus response: 25.

Even French Revolutionary (Decimal) Time works out at 36 standard minutes.

¼ decimal hour = 25 decimal minutes but 100 decimal minutes = 144 standard minutes.

Re: AI will eventually make us retards

Ultimately the only intellectuals or indeed any form of intelligent life remaining will be the hippies.

I imagine sending your kids to Tom Brown's Rugby or St Trinians might have a better prospect of developing their brains (and survival skills) than the last 100 years of successive educational fads and so called reforms.

I find I have an increasing appreciation of Dorothy L Sayers' 1947 essay The Lost Tools of Learning.

700+ self-hosted Gits battered in 0-day attacks with no fix imminent

"700+ self-hosted Gits"

Why did I automatically think of the Vulture's commentariat ?

The rest sounds like aggravated elder abuse.

Microsoft won't fix .NET RCE bug affecting slew of enterprise apps, researchers say

"The neanderthal user should have manually verified the WSDL file"

A bit unfair on our Neanderthal cousins who had the good sense to avoid Windows, Microsoft, computers and pretty much everything else.

I hope they along with the Denisovans hitched a ride with some passing space aliens to a far saner place but the reality is more like they, facing an interminable future with their insane "sapiens" relatives decided to just not bother… a sentiment I can easily understand.

I was wondering what interest the Jehovah's would have in Windows security until I realized Watchtowr was missing the 'e'. I always had the impression the JW would be in the same queue as the Neanderthals waiting for a lift to a better place.

Welcome to America - now show us your last five years of social media posts

Re: The right number of corners

The planet is credibly an oblate spheroid but Trumpisstan always was a Möbius strip (everything has only one side) but is now, reflecting the topology of DJT's feat of shoving his head so far up his own arse so that it emerged from the other end, a Klein bottle.

Oh dear. I suppose I shan't ever be visiting Hawaii now.

Electric cars no more likely to flatten you than the noisy ones, study finds

pheasants, crows, pigeons etc

Perhaps your leccy wagon could be fitted with shotgun sound effects (frequency compensated for vehicle's air speed [Doppler effect].)

I am sure Purdey could do a bespoke accessory for the luxury car market. ;)

An old clagged out banger with worn rings and off timing, regularly backfiring would have the same effect, I imagine.

Re: Vehicle weight?

I suspect even at very low speeds unexpectedly being rapidly thrown on to a hard surface with or without edges (eg gutters) could cause significant injury.

I imagine a bit like being tackled out of the blue by a forward from the Welsh front row.

One aspect I think the study didn't consider was whether drivers (more particularly owners) of (H)EV were significantly different from ICEV drivers in any number of safety relevant factors eg age, experience etc.

I would conjecture EV owners (perhaps excluding Tesla owners ;) would be more safety conscious and attentive drivers. If that were true it would imply that the EVs considering the vehicle alone were actually slightly more dangerous than ICEVs. Perhaps HEVs combine the worst of ICEV drivers with the failings of EVs ?

The stats for HEVs do show a higher casualty rate (normalized to travelled distance) than EVs or ICEVs.

Re: Unless it's a Tesla..

"if you said anything against Elon"

Oh Dear ! And in these parts Teslarati are endemic.

I suppose in the interest of self preservation I oughtn't say anything derogatory about that ketamine addled elephant tw@t… but hell you only live once.

Rocket Lab ready to send a Hungry Hippo into space

Re: You Only Live Twice

"dead volcano to land this (I understand NZ has lots of those)"

And a few live (active) ones which generally don't give you a second chance.

Probably wise to consider volcanos dormant (sleeping - like Cthulhu) rather than dead or extinct.

Looking from above I was thinking more shark than hippo although I believe hippos account for more fatalities than the rest of African wildlife combined so likely far more dangerous than sharks gobally.

Pretty clever, I suppose, but I also see two more moving parts that can fail together or separately.

Affection for Excel spans generations, from Boomers to Zoomers

"says more about finance professionals than it does about Excel."

The dismal financial history of the last four decades must rank "finance" "professionals" up there with the great oxymorons… Excel getting into act sort of, pardoning the pun, figures.

Spreadsheets generally look like a decent model-view-application whose specification has been masticated by AI which vibe coding has spat out.

The idea of tabular data entry and presentation pre·date spreadsheets and aren't a bad idea. Embedding the applications logic in the table isn't the greatest idea and compounding that felony by doing it in the least abstract and least transparent manner possible must rank with the least best ideas of all time.

Vibe coding will deliver a wonderful proliferation of personalized software

"rewrite expectations about how IT will operate before the end of this decade."

You mean it can get worse ?

Galactic Brain space datacenter coming in 2027, pledges startup Aetherflux

"The race for artificial general intelligence is fundamentally a race for compute capacity"

Is it now ? Purely an article of faith and on pretty shaky ground even at this point.

I suppose a perfectly serviceable article of bad faith if the intention is to flog the idea, grab the cash and leg it.

Personally I don't believe any LLM even on a scale comparable with the human brain will ever exhibit general intelligence leaving aside that such an LLM would likely require a planetary scale power supply.

Australia bans teens from social media, but nobody thinks it'll really work

Re: Great Firewall of Australia

The carriers cannot get emergency caling (000) working properly for mobiles so any GFoA is only going to fly if the 'F' references fornication.

Great Carrier Reef? — Great Carrier Reefer more likely.

"children won't be able to escape the ban forever" — Minister "responsible."

Ahem. In most cases a couple years would do it, wouldn't it ?

Unless you live in Never Never Land with Peter Pan and Tinker Bell, as our pollies clearly do, children do grow up… hopefully into adults.

Hopefully once the theatre and farce of these silly season productions are over, parents will be more aware of the potential pitfalls of the exposure of their early teen children to these media and then will be more prepared to take responsibility.†

I suspect the media companies might be more pro·active in future fearing a much more heavy handed approach in other jurisdictions given any perceived success in AU.

† hope springs eternal, porcine aviation etc

"social media companies complied without putting up much of a fight."

Which pretty much tells you that they have determined that it is not going to make much of a difference to their bottom line and the extra data they will garner as a consequence of their enforcing the ban may well be gold.

Personally, I would be happy if they banned the whole boiling for the under 95s. :)

As humanoid robots enter the mainstream, security pros flag the risk of botnets on legs

"Have we learned nothing…"

A rhetorical question, surely ?

IBM touts progress on tech stack for AI-enabled airline with no passengers or alcohol

I initially read that as Ryanair

"AI enabled airline with no passengers or alcohol" — perhaps understandable.

_{I stumbled over Hitler's Ryanair Rant last weekend so also perhaps preconditioned. :)}

UK tech minister vows more whole-government megadeals after £9B Microsoft pact

Re: It won't work

"One five billion pound aircraft carrier in dry dock when the propeller fell off!"

Would have been worse if the propeller had fallen off while at sea. :)

Windows Insiders get a glimpse of Microsoft’s agentic future

Re: MCP WTF

Didn't MCP once mean Microsoft Certified Professional ?

That usage was probably retrenched ages ago as those so certified have long been sectioned. ;)

Bezos-backed Unconventional AI aims to make datacenter power problems go away

Re: Twaddle

"People with a PhD have gone right to the edge and beyond…"

I think most would agree with you… at least up to that point. :)

"amazes me that people with a PhD often seem to have less common sense"

If you ever worked in a "factory†" that produces these, you would not be amazed… unsurprised might be the right word.

I imagine the point was that digital logic like TTL is composed of elements (eg bipolar transistors) that are intrinsically analogue but with clever design that aspect is minimized. I suspect you would need to be pretty clever to build an audio amp using using a 7400 (dual 4-input NAND.)

_{† aka "an institution" — right place for them… letting them out was always a mistake.}

Re: Worm Power

"Imagine the computing power of the combined mass of worms in a field"

Rather the opposite to AI, I would have thought ?

The worms convert shit into something useful… soil etc and ultimately food.

AI converts pretty much everything and anything into irrecoverable shit.

Researchers spot 700 percent increase in hypervisor ransomware attacks

"likes to use the term % as an excuse to display their lack of education"

I cannot say that I have detected any need for an excuse from that quarter when arrogantly exhibiting their profound ignorance — certainly not recently.

One wonder whether the ‰ symbol might trigger some kind of existential crisis in such small crania. ;)

Death in the dollhouse as Microsoft marketing reboots digital soap operas

I assume Contoso …

was a Con to[o]. So?

Microsoft and the rest of the tech industry have already become a parody of Douglas Adams' Sirius Cybernetcs Corporation lacking only the real people personality (so far) in their slop.

The only silver lining are the spaces reputedly reserved for them in front of the wall.

China’s first reusable rocket explodes, but its onboard Ethernet network flew

Re: Ethernet on rockets

I was a bit puzzled by "high-speed Powerlink real-time Ethernet” and "exceeding 100Mbps"

Seemed like a little overegging by the LandSpace PR team.

But Powerlink is a real industrial networking technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_Powerlink

India's government targets Uber, Ola with plan to launch zero-commission rideshare platform

Re: This can only end well

"government ... started insurance companies"

Another reason was that many states' insurance needs were sufficiently large that self insurance made economic sense. Extending that into offering citizens general insurance was then a small extension.

The same might be said about state owned banks — governments are very big users of banking services.

When elected politicians became too lazy or apathetic to take responsibility for government, they could not flog off state enterprises fast enough.

Tech leaders fill $1T AI bubble, insist it doesn't exist

Wu ?

"talking to the largest customers. And there's not a concept of a bubble."

Not a concept of a bubble … nor of anything else one imagines.

I suppose if the bubble were large enough you wouldn't noticed it even if you were standing on its interior surface.

"do we see a bubble, we don't see a bubble"

None so blind as those who won't see. Seeing vaguely whale shaped clouds doesn't present the same difficulty one suspects.

Crims using social media images, videos in 'virtual kidnapping' scams

Could be a nasty shock…

for an undetected murderer receiving a ransom note with proof·of·life of someone they had confidently and secretly deep sixed.

Microsoft 365 boosts prices in 2026 … to pay for more AI and security

Re: It makes me smile

"full cloud is a bad idea"

Never go full retard cloud.

Fuck whits. See above.

FreeBSD 15 trims legacy fat and revamps how OS is built

I would wonder…

"My granny is wondering, are you free next weekend to teach her how to suck eggs?"

How many grannies would know what sucking eggs was let alone how to do it?

My granny certainly didn't (b. <1900 d.~1980) but she was a profoundly ignorant twat and dafter than a brush.

It is a clever trick if you want an empty egg shell—to decorate ?

Bots, bias, and bunk: How can you tell what's real on the net?

Re: A few pointers

Believing in magic is a just a disguise for ignorance^†

More a flagrant advertisement of rather than a disguise I would have thought—a bit like Jodhpurs and jackboots being camouflage for your common garden variety nazi.

_{† unless you live on the Disc where belief in magic is rational but where the actual practice of magic exhibits suicidally dangerous ignorance.}

"Liars, cranks, and con artists have always been with us."

But never so consistently and pervasively bound together in individuals - a malady or distemper that has infected a large proportion of the US population.

The AI and Crypto bros are exemplars.

"How do you tell what's real on the net? " — Strictly, nothing on the internet is real. At best it can only be a representation of or commentary on something that may or may not exist in the world outside the internet.

The problem predates the internet. Newsprint and radio had its moments in the lies, misinformation and deception stakes especially in less regulated jurisdictions only lacking the immersive depth of the internet.

In most cases the worst internet codswallop can be discounted by simple logic.

The simplest reason I know that Mrs Clinton did not run an Epstein rent-a-teen business out of a pizza bar is that if she had it would be a trillion dollar global franchise today. (Clue: it isn't.)

The ongoing destruction of the NIH and the US CDCs as sources of trusted, reliable, scientific evidence based health and medical information, for sheer vandalism, must rank with the destruction of the classical Library of Alexandria by similarly motivated fanatics.

The point about fine movement of the lips, eyes and eyelids was actually brought home to me earlier today when I was running a few minutes of a video at 0.25 speed to locate a few frames. I could easily detect those involuntary movements in the actors' close·ups.

Sorry, but your glitchy connection might have cost you that job

Re: I'm too glitchy for my job, too glitchy

I rather liked Max and would hire him any day although not entirely sure what I would hire him for. Cocktail barman ? more shaken than stirred I should think.

In the near future you will be expected to craft or have crafted for you a 3D AI agentic avatar that will be downloaded to the prospective employer removing the need for a real time link. The interview panel will be constituted with equally dismal HR AI abominations. Personally I would delegate a terminator avatar.

Certainly very glad to have retired before this dystopian nightmare had commenced and will have checked out well before the consequences of this lunacy completely screw the planet.

We'll beat China to the Moon, NASA nominee declares

Re: Why did they stop?

1950s / 60s America. Racism, homophobia & xenophobia, combined with massive inequality,

Does rather denigrate the beneficial if glacial progress made over the course of the sixties and into the seventies.

Admittedly coming off a dismally low base but postive change has to recognised and even celebrated if you hope for s better world.

Not that I actually give a rat's about anything that happens in the US — pretty much irredeemable and have been for a long time.

"radio astronomy from the back side"

I don't think I have seen that side of the Moon referred to as the "back side" — just "far side" or inaccurately "dark side" but probably just never noticed.

Still Radio Arsetronomy would be one up on Uranus if it referred to lunar trans·terra radio astronomy. ;)

Re: Current NASA situation

"I'd love to get my arms around where we are presently at."

Could someone translate that into English, please?

I suspect for the rest of the non·decorticate world substituting "head" for "arms" makes more sense. Hell ! American have to use the few neural resources remaining in their possession.

Does have a certain covfefe odour about it though as I suspect he might have been imagining the lovelies in the NASA secretarial pool when answering his questioners.

OpenAI turns the screws on chatbots to get them to confess mischief

"you can't use another bullshitter to check a bullshitter."

You can but you just get higher order crap. Bullshit² … ad infinitem

I don't suppose this sewerage factory has a least fixed point either.

Perhaps OpenAI should be made to confess...

If you put Altman in the chair and attach the electrodes I would be delighted to stump for the power. ;)

Latest Windows 11 updates may break the OS's most basic bits

Re: Windows "Professional" "Enterprise"...

Now it is "Windows Professional".

For a particular meaning of "professional" as in you fuck with it but pretty quickly find yourself with little to show for the exercise, if you are lucky, other than just poorer. Seems pretty apt.

Windows "Professional" "Enterprise"... "Cockup" ?

Looks like Microsoft is not only "at home" to Mr Cockup. but it's liberty hall for all his near relations and acquaintances.

Windows 11 still barely pulling ahead of 10 despite end-of-support push

start menu complain[t]s.

Have they really made it worse than W10's?

To my unacustomed eyes I fear so.

If so, that must be true genius at work.

Poettering ? :)

Re: What about moving to Linux?

"use tablets or phones"

Unless you were going for a "feature" phone — both IOS and Android are based on a Unix or Linux kernel. ;)

MacOS is derived from a FreeBSD/Mach microkernel (Darwin.)

The beef with "Linux" at this level is mostly with the (graphical) user interface or rather the confusing variety of user interfaces.

There are very decent distros that provide a stable, understandable interface not too dissimilar to windows or macosx.

The major objection to Linux and competing OS by windows users is the lack of one or more applications that are crucial for their work or interests.

The number of those objections are decreasing year by year as many commercial applications are now cloud hosted and/or browser based ie platform agnostic.

HPE positions Morpheus stack as enterprise alternative to VMware

Morpheus! Where do they get the names?

Good question.

I assumed the stems of Morpheus and morphology (say) were different with the latter's sense intended by software developers.

Actually the same stem morphē (μορφή) — form, shape; beauty, outward appearance

Morpheus is usually considered the god of sleep but probably more relevantly here is the god of dreams, the son Somnia, god of sleep.

So in this sense Morpheus is the orchestrator of a representation (the form or appearance of) the waking world in the sleep brain of man, namely his dreams.

A VM manager might then be considered the Morpheus of virtual machines.

All a bit deeper than the unplumbed depths of a teaspoon typical of the developer or marketing crowd.

Lawyer's 6-year-old son uses AI to build copyright infringement generator

"[My son] created something that I spent over a decade of my life preventing others from doing."

Like making a fairer, livable world ?

Might be the anthem of the young for the next fifty years.