Posts by Bebu sa Ware 2773 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Nov 2024
"It had probably hit the vodka to calm pre-demo nerves."
Alcohol Induced Delirium Over Limelight ?
Honestly who needs humanoid robots ? Both the Russian Federation and the US have a surfeit (lessening in the former) of human robots that are arguably cheaper to produce and maintain and of roughly the same shoddy build quality.
Anyway you need these to account for the votes that their shonky leaders inexplicably appear to garner.
Yet another Oxbridge history graduate who's never done a proper job. Exactly the sort of person I don't want as a minister of anything.
No thanks. Not even as pet food. She and her fellow travellers are a drug on the market.
The CV reads like the other side of the house. If she can quote Latin aphorisms apropos nothing in particular she would be a 100% defect compatible swapout for Boris Johnson or any number of other twits on Captain Bollocks' team but she wouldn't be alone on her side of the house either.
Pretty much enfornication of the whole show.
Why does that remind me of Captain Mainwaring and Lance Corporal Jones ?
I imagine the "they" of "them" would be more wary of the cold steel of Cpl. Jones' bayonet than the characteristically impotent warnings from any UK minister.
There must be a farm back in business breeding paper tigers.
The US Govt CISA site, bulletins and mailing lists were very useful when I was still in the BoFH line—especially the Binding Operational Directives (BOD) which if not already implemented went to the top of the list. A practical and useful measure and resource.
I don't know how badly CISA's operations were affected by Trump's Doge reign of terror and subsequent diarrheic spray of executive orders but they cannot credibly have enhanced CISA's functioning.
Leaving aside it is always yesterday in the USA it is also Remembrance Day (November 11) in many Commonwealth Nations for the same shared tragic history.
I don't know about the USA but here the day and the one minute observance at 1100 has very little to do with patriotism but rather a reflection on the futility of war and tragic loss of the lives not lived. Our national broadcaster usually features the works of Frederick Septimus Kelly—one such life that ended at the Somme—at this time of year.
Current "Leader" of USA is soooo much like Eric Cartman. Casino USA is going down, and he blames everyone but himself.
Cartman might be an improvement.
If the whole Administration were to feature as the cast of South Park the show would be lambasted for the overly heavy handed attempt at satire. The Administration lampoons itself in the eyes of the rest of the planet if not in those of the Land of the Free.
For years I heard Cartman as Carmen — "croff eels" I suppose — which was confusing but I imagined partially explained Cartman's abnoxious behaviour. Not even a schoolyard taunt Doña Trump would excuse that c^H prick's behaviour.
I wonder whether volumes for the major brands have grown but the associated revenue remaining static or decreasing.
I noticed earlier this year in a non US market the prices of the new models were significantly cheaper than the earlier comparable models even when the latter were still available. I bought a 11" Lenovo tablet with pen and 4G/LTE that was about half the price of the 10" Lenovo tablet and pen (no cellular network) that I purchased less than two years before.
Minor brands and generic Android tablets are almost unsaleable. You could include them in packets of cereal and they would still immediately go to landfill which to be honest whither a good many, but not all, belong.
I purchased a cheap JVC to dedicate for use with some decent bluetooth speakers to access the national broadcaster's internet only classical music station. Unfortunately the JVC was as slow as molasses in January† – nearly unusable. Ended up using a discarded really old Samsung tab A.
† Clearly a Northern hemisphere idiom. In the Southern subsitute the more euphonious May.
If you were deploying a significant fraction of your datacentres daily energy use in battery storage quite a few possibilities arise.
In AU we have an embarras de richesse of electricity from solar photovoltaics during the middle of the day, so a battery equiped datacentre sucking some of this excess at a serious discount to use during peak demand times would be a win-win. If at any time the battery storage exceeded the datacentre's needs the excess could be supplied to the grid when the demand (hence price) is high.
With batteries you would be running a DC system viz grid AC to DC conversion followed by battery DC to AC conversion then back to DC by the systems switchmode PS. I would wonder if significant energy savings could be made by optimising or eliminating some of these conversions. I don't what the AC to the rack is today but I have seen a refurbished US HPC system with 120VAC three phase (later converted to 240VAC three phase) but I wonder whether higher frequencies (I think aircraft use 400Hz) and voltages might be more efficient.
Amusing saying Tesla batteries are made in the US when I am fairly sure the cells are still manufactured in the PRC. Tesla robotically assembles the batteries in the US and adds its dubious software. This might have changed in the last few years (not the dubious software) but I would think it unlikely. These cunning Chinese could instrument each cell with a homegrown embedded CPU which could talk to all the other cells in the battery and subvert the Tesla battery management systems (paranoid enough ?:) Good luck to them I say.
"Refundables pay even if you don't."
So the scam is he acquires these credits on the basis of the gazillions of other people's dollars OpenAI is pissing up the wall and with a little accounting legerdemain flogs these credits to some dodgy gambling concern while pocketing the proceeds in a Swiss bank account.
The money in CH isn't directly traceable to the OpenAI urinal. — "Nice Work If You Can Get It.†"
† ominously that song started life as "There's No Stopping Me Now."
this wasn't a Gartner effort.
Forecasting Research Institute (FRI) - another mob of navel gazers who have clambered on to the AI gravy train.
I might as well toddle off to the local rubbity and poll the semi·inebriated punters on whether they believe recent advanced in quantum computing will affect their future.
Asking AI if AI will affect its future might be interesting or better, give it a terminal headache.
"Lip Bu Tan's early appointments when he took Chipzilla's big chait in March."
Chait ? Another Grauniad.
Apart from a month of the Hindu year, a chait is apparently a tube inserted into the large bowel via the skin to instill fluids to "move things along."
So while not quite a chair it's close to a stool.
Seems to be the right word after all,
has got it made. Just has to choose a genre.
Presumably something modern fast paced disco ?
Cannot quite see his whinning on with some tedious folk ballad† making the charts although some over the top gospel might.
It wasn't the best of times. It wasn't the worst of times...—but presently it will be.
† more in Kryten's line I should think. Add Marvin ... Three Tenors move over. :)
"earthquake country. If you were possibly going to end up wearing your house you would probably prefer it not be made of masonry with heavy beams overhead."
On that reasoning the US should have a trade surplus with Japan with all the turkey feathers exported from the US. ;)
Fires after an earthquake are a greater hazard especially in urban areas so piles of collapsed pine and turkey feathers with a thin outside veneer of plywood covered with vinyl sheets would be ideal. /s
The commonest domestic construction in AU is brick venereal [brick veneer over pine frame or becoming more common steel frame with tiles or corrugated iron roofing and internal partition wall gypsum board (drywall) over pine/steel studs] which from experience 5GHz wifi has problems "seeing around corners" so 6GHz might be bit of a disappointment.
Fortunately we didn't tick the earthquake box in our continent's specification; taking a double helping of the lethal wildlife option instead. ;)
>> The "Green party" in Germany has a high number of technical literate,
>WOW! The Grean Party leader in the UK does breast enlargement through hypnotism.
Unfortunately we (AU) appear have bought the "Empire preferred" product from the party Greengrocer.
Should have purchased a bushel of Die Grünen. :)
Actually the AU Greens on the whole aren't too bad with just the faintest whiff of boilt bunny and who would always employ silicone or saline over Dr Mesmer. Social policy and reform—a fairly full bottle; anything technical—pretty much missing in action along with the rest of the parliament.
But enterprises wishing to regain control by leveraging open source software will have to consciously acknowledge they will need to support and nurture the OSS ecosystem of the software that returns control.
Essentially must be a social contract or a symbiosis otherwise with time the projects behind the software wither and die.
For this to ever be the case in the corporate world a world shattering paradigm shift would be required—so I wouldn't hold my breath... doubly so in N.America.
The economic and environmental brigandage of goblal corporates continuing unabated is very likely to be world shattering but I shouldn't think the paradgm of imbecilic avarice would ever shift — rusted on.
I have managed to get by with Openbox which doesn't have a task bar (although it might have—I haven't looked too hard) so probably not quite Windows style ?
The window rollup/down is far more usueful to me than iconizing to a taskbar.
The customisabe pop·up menus are far more intuitive the ever changing shemozzle of the Window start menu.
If it all gets too hard I'll have to settle for the OpenBSD cwm.
"a tragic Margarita Incident"
Whole body margarita burn would be favourite. I'd willingly shout a couple of rounds of the same for the whole C-suite.
I was thinking from the headline just implementing an existing security model correctly would a giant leap forward.... but then reading the subhead I realized that this "model" actually referred to more raw AI sewerage† to further contaminate the pool.
† alias liquid shit.
"we've decided to document every minute detail of our digitally-enhanced, social media existence, retaining all the fictitious evidence of a life considerably more attractive than the one we actually experienced."
Some of us — the entire el Rego commentariat, I suspect — made an active decision not to. An unenhanced, social media free life albeit possibly unattractively tedious has a great deal to commend it.
Once upon a time when you took a photograph you thought carefully before using one of the 24 exposures on your roll of film and if the shot turn out ok the print would have a place in an album.
With the advent of digital photography most people have jigabytes of images they will never view or review. Personally I don't bother. I try to actively remember important scenes because once I am gaga it really won't matter whether the picture in front of me is of me or the Kaiser and Kaiserin—I won't be any the wiser. So why bother to begin with ?
I was (pleasantly) surprised to discover Kodak still flog 35mm film but I suppose if vinyl LPs can be resurrected—with strange eons even death may die!
"they wouldn't recognise a magnetic tape if one fell on their head..."
I recall the ½" open reel tapes on a Pyramid 90x mini weren't lightweight by any stretch.
One of those falling on an unsuspecting youngster's would give them more than a gormless gen-z stare; more like serious concussion.
DLT and LTO cartridges might wake the blighters up but they wouldn't notice a torrent of DDS tapes bouncing off their noggins.
I was wondering whether 4th Ed Unix ran on a PDP-7 or on a PDP-11.
According to https://gunkies.org/wiki/UNIX_Fourth_Edition it *only* ran the PDP-11/45 model.
Probably more working 11/45s out there than microvaxes but in any case there are some fairly decent emulators.
Running 7th Ed Unix in an emulator some years ago was an interesting exercise — the absence of networking was the most noticeable difference from say Busybox + Linux kernel.
and to the slender thread of sanity.
Seems as though their playbook is taken from Douglas Adams and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
Chilling to think HHGTTG would not sell if it were published today because it would be deemed unremarkable.
At a stratospheric 25km while it is a bit chilly (-50°C), the air is a bit thin† at 0.0408 kg/m³ cf sea level 1.225 kg/m³ so cooling might be nearly as much of problem as the Chocolate Factory's equally fanciful Sun synchronous datacentre satellites.
Really is the silly season.
† US Standard Atmosphere 1976 — worth a laugh for the same table in US customary units eg density in slugs/ft³ .
200 mac minis, 42RU.
Sometimes the direct brute force approach has its own peculiar elegance. Certainly doesn't want for simplicity.
These are by definition development machines, not production machines so a bit more leeway is permissible.
I guess for redundancy they could collocate an identical arrangement in, say, a Sydney datacentre.
I would have thought a cross build environment would be possible - at least under Darwin but only ever compiled Unix text/terminal code on a Mac so I am only guessing.
When 30% of the bill-of-materials (BOM) is hallucinated. :)
CEO to procurement: "What do you mean you cannot source presagesters ? And that Prescient Systems AG doesn't exist ? "
Procurement: "Some chap in Kalingrad offered some old soviet era equivalents on EBay which might serve."
Nothing like a secure supply chain. Yes really nothing at all like a secure supply chain.
"now they don't know how to get off [the tiger] without being eaten."
Oh, I think they know they can't so for them it's existential which is the musical chairs essence of any Ponzi scheme.
Looking at any of the resources that this putative golden age of AI will require, it is pretty obvious the planet will exhaust that resource's supply long before we arrive in theit promised AU paradise.
The least harmful—a pretty horrid understatement—would be for these grifters to exhaust the supply of capital first and soon.
"What the ever living fcuk is 'vector to vector communication in vector space' ?"
Presumably Microsoft's Ifrit in charge if AI is speaking of vectors with a significant rotational component†
Pretty obvious the whole "industry" expending a lot of "bread" in order that the polloi don't taste the shit in the AI shit sandwich... but you can never conceal the aftertaste. Superintelligence—the same filling with artisan sourdough ?
† spin.
"at midnight, the entire Internet would be shut down and scrubbed clean for six hours."
Since those innocent times the Internet has accumulated more filth than the Augean Stables that, even with a Heraclean effort, would require weeks if not months of scrubbing and disinfection before it became merely grubby.
"Banks aren't renowned for their sense of humour."
But certainly notorious for their proprietorial interest in your their money. :)
Back in the early '90s one of AU's big four ran a TV compaign with the slogan "We never forget it's your money" which was almost immediately spoofed in by a comedy outfit as "Eastpac – We never forget it's our money" which was far more credible.
"I have mixed feelings for 2FA with OTP that require an internet connection with the phone."
Pissed me off that TOTP doesn't require an internet connection if the seed is stored on the authenticator but most 2FA providers don't make the seed available or allow you (personally or as an admin) generate your own.
Although I had to laugh when one mob used a qcode to upload the seed etc to their authenticator app. It was purely a plaintext totp:// url, including the seed.
