Posts by Bebu sa Ware

Financial 'stretch' for UK to join Europe's Starlink rival, says minister

Re: smell the lovely sovrinty, feel the width

"the UK might end up as a US territory,"

Gitmo mk II ?

Perhaps it's time for the UK or more particularly England to be more realistic about its place in the world. Certainly not conceivably a superpower since Suez and now barely a regional power since Brexit. All in all, UK probably ranks around Portugal which at least had the common sense to remain in the EU (not afaik that there was any desire to leave.)

"Rule, Britannia ! Rule the waves: Britons never will be slaves." Probably fortunate that the average Brexiteer is probably not bright enough for the role.

Microsoft Windows Firewall complains about Microsoft code

Re: Great Expectations

Windows Firewall "is expected to function normally,"

Well Pip, that would also be trivially true if you were to turn the firewall off.

Actually more so as it's functioning (or more properly lack of) is not only completely expected and predicable but vastly more reliable.

_{As a schoolboy Dickens' opus was of course Great Expectorations.}

DoJ clears HPE to buy Juniper if it sells Instant On Wi-Fi and licenses some code

Re: A rare merger.

"Divide at_[et] Impera (merge ant lost)"

Perhaps per unionem pereunt.

China successfully tests hypersonic aircraft, maybe at Mach 12

Re: Hilarious

"graduates are not total kluten."

Likely true everywhere... even including the US perhaps surpringly.

Unfortunately for the US just about everything in the public sector that involves science or technology even tangentially is now in the grasping paws of creatures that to call total kluten^† would be pure sycophancy.

_{† I initially assumed the OP mean klutz (Yid.) and that klutzen was a plural but kluten is also German clods or even dumplings.}

There's no international protocol on what to do if an asteroid strikes Earth

Re: There's no protocol .... There must be a Clarke and Dawe for that, surely...

"There must be a Clarke and Dawe for that, surely..."

This jewel would have to be a contender: The Front Fell Off.

I imagine even left ponders might appreciate the Australian humour.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter learns new trick at the age of 19: ‘very large rolls’

Re: American attitudes of late

"Barring Trump and Hegseth starting WWIII of course which is a remote but not unthinkable possibility."....

and losing - a possibility neither remote nor unthinkable given both their limited competencies.

Tesla Robotaxi videos show Elon's way behind Waymo

Re: Let me guess...

I wouldn't have thought a developer would expend too many lines of code on having Lidar discern the difference between a dragon and a wyvern; approaching either would be an occasion for a handbrake turn and a rapid retreat, I would have thought. :)

Teens used encrypted chats to recruit for 'violence as a service' murder ring, Europol says

"how the contract rates compare with more those of more traditional criminals."

I suspect it will follow everything in the uberisation of the economy. You pay some arsehole intermediary† over the odds who puts the job out for bidding on the "app" to source some drug affected retard who either turn up late at the wrong address and shoots the dog, or at the right address and shoots the principal instead of the intended victim.

Traditional criminals sensibly stick to more lucrative activities where the isn't such a clear nexus between the crime and the criminal. Knocking off a business competitor, inconvenient mistress, or spouse etc will normally put the principal clearly in the frame even for the dullest plod. With enough digging a connection between the principal and the contractor inevitabiy would be found.

_{† aka gig economy entrepreneur.}

Japan builds near $700M fund to lure foreign academic talent

Re: Work prospects

I can believe the negative experience of your colleagues. JP is very different from just about any other nation let alone a western European one.

Life isn't exactly brilliant for the local inhabitants which some of younger generation understand. Some wash up in AU or hook up with an Australian and are more than content to call AU home permanently.

On the other hand Australian chaps who have acquired JP girlfriends etc and/or were proficient in the language have settled happily in JP in spite of all the difficulties foreigners face.

I have often jokingly remarked that beneath the serenity and minimalist elegance of Japanese art and architecture lurks the repressed homicidal psychotic. Possibly a wry joke.

Btw I found the typo "when it comes to in the ground behaviour, things are very different " rather amusing given the traditional Japanese beliefs regarding ghosts. Generally in my part of the world any potential behaviour of anyone once placed in the ground is invariably severely curtailed. :)

Still Japan has a remarkable culture ancient but incredibly resilient unlike any other in resisting the more insidious consequences of western contact since Meiji restoration; a culture that is largely ineffable to the unexceptional foreigner.

When reading The Tale of Genji (Murasaki) it's hard to credit it was written by a Japanese woman over a thousand years ago when just about everyone in Europe including the great and good were completely illiterate.

Salesforce study finds LLM agents flunk CRM and confidentiality tests

Re: LLM-based AI agents fail to undertand....anything!

LLM's don't really do inference... just fancy statistics...

I suppose it depends on what "inference" is taken to mean. In this context: any wild or random guess that is mostly not contradicted by facts (the training data.)

I was wondering the other day whether LLMs' training would implicitly encode cause-effect relations and that cause must precede effect (in time.) My guess is it's highly unlikely. The syntax (subject verb object etc) of English would provide some ordering but I suspect not a lot.

When I see the word inference I normally take it to mean a deductive logic which from what you know, you apply a set of reasoning rules to produce a valid result that is guaranteed not to contradict what you already knew. Really just makes explicit what was implicit in your existing explicit knowledge.

The inductive logic of Sherlock Holmes is closer to that of a LLM but he also used deductive logic, his knowledge of the contraints imposed by the physical physical world, and statistical likelihood to exclude the impossible to reach his solution. Although on that basis it might have been Arthur Balfour and not James Moriarty who was the mastermind of London crime. :)

Tape, glass, and molecules – the future of archival storage

Re: The DNA fantasy

Breed a species of scribal monkeys who repeatedly and mechanically copy text documents down their generations.

Actually breeding probably not a good idea as it can only distract them from their transcription tasks; cloning a much better idea.

Forget Vibe Coding, we're all about Vine Coding nowadays

Kudzu

Systemd is a prime example of vine coding. It wraps its tendrils round everything.

Redhat, which was also the leading culprit in the systemd felony, until RHEL5 had a device discovery service called kudzu which apart from causing some peculiar problems,^† I assumed was a neologism from some dude programmer.

I discovered it is actually an extremely invasive vine particularly in the US (imported originally from Japan) that rapid gets its tendrils into everything.

There is some similarity between those two services and the way AI is infiltrating just about everything. Can't wait for AI enhanced systemd... actually I very much can...

_{† on servers kudzu was usually best disabled. That option is unavailable for systemd, alas.}

Single passenger reportedly survives Air India Boeing 787 crash

Re: Survivor

"I can see that Seat 11A is going to be very popular with passengers in the future."

From memory for those seats on the escape route aisles you have to speak English (presumably to understand crew instructions) and be physically capable of opening the escape hatch but you do get extra leg-room and are one of the first to "deplane" in an emergency.

If this tragedy wasn't substantially due to pilot error it might be the last nail in Boeing's corporate coffin.

_{FWIW seat/aisle numbers very much depend on the seating configuration which in turn depends on the carrier and even the route.}

BOFH: Rerouting responsibility via firewall configs

"web interface ... a back-rev browser that doesn't complain about certificate errors."

Clearly someone who has been there...

Firefox versions that were from 3.x era and old versions of Sun [sic] java for jws support (all under RHEL7) takes some ingenuity all that just to support and manage hardware that would otherwise embarrass the other less senior occupants of the e-waste skip.

X's new 'encrypted' XChat feature seems no more secure than the failure that came before it

Re: A world of shite

"neither fish nor foul." Nice typo. ;)

"His base is confused, his haters are confused." And crucially he himself is utterly confused.

The Beatles lyrics are rather apt.

"Sitting in his Nowhere Land, / Making all his nowhere plans for nobody."

"He’s as blind as he can be, / Just sees what he wants to see,"

In one of his photographs taken recently at the end of his DoGE reign of error, he can be seen for what he fundamentally is - a podgy, balding middle aged painfully ordinary male who in another decade could do a passable Mr Magoo impression. I can believe his mortality scares him shitless and the knowledge that even gazillions of dollars won't ultimately make one jot of difference^†.

_{† his reputed intake of especial K is very likely will make a difference albeit negatively.}

Workday promises to grow workforce slowly and differently after shedding 1,750 jobs

I can forsee a lot of commitment to the business from these new hires...

right!

I am not Father Christmas but the other leg undoubtedly does play Jingle Bells.

Trump announces $175B for Golden Dome defense shield over America

Re: So...

Looks like some of the components of Canada's Arctic OTH will incorporate AU technology.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-13/canada-urgently-wants-australias-jorn-defence-radar/105185284

AU has been developing the tech for decades (Jindalee) with JORN being the Jindalee Operational Radar Network presumably to keep tabs on our northern friends.

I suspect the utility of this tech with the ionosphere over the tropics and subtropics is one thing but with the ionosphere over the polar regions might be another.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

"Never any US to UK translation."

Why is it that Americans seem unable to deal with UK English. We in the UK seem to manage to deal with the US version. We have to. There is never any US to UK translation.

The mapping from en_UK to en_US is (very) many to one with the consequent loss of meaning for the great many concepts the American intellect is unable to grasp.

Mapping from en_US is basically choosing the en_UK word or concept from the shallowest available which even densest of the pommy polloi can manage in their heads.

Plan to keep advanced chips from China with tracking tech gains support in Congress

IPv6

Lots of US companies bought IPv4 ranges from LACNIC and AFNIC (and even from RIPE) for US usage due to the lack of available ranges in the US.

Rather a joke on the US if the only out was wider adoption of IPv6 in the US which I suspect is currently miniscule. The PRC and East Asia generally IPv6 is more prevalent and maybe the rule.

I don't know if or how geolocation works with IPv6 but I would think each /48 prefix would map directly to the entity assigned the prefix which I guess in the absence of NAT or proxy/gateways would be better than IPv4.

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

"A professional knows exactly how bad a job they can get away with, ...."

"A professional knows exactly how bad a job they can get away with, while an amateur does the best job they possibly can for the love of it."

Could apply with even greater applicability to a very much old profession.† Moll's Law?

_{† arguably both trades involve a soft something and invariably f...ing that something.}

US tech titans rejoice in $600B Saudi shopping spree

Cooling seems like a real problem though

something on El Rego a while ago that it was easier to cool datacenters† in hot dry environments (deserts) than in not quite so hot humid environments (tropics.)

I don't remember whether the hot dry cooling was predicated on evaporating water into the dry atmosphere or some other reason. Fresh water is not something the gulf is exactly awash in. I guess you might be able to harness the waste heat to assist the desalination of seawater.

With a little luck the bottom will fall out of the AI tulip market before the hardware is paid for or shipped and old bin bone saw can reneg on the deal in much the same way the Trumpty administration has done on a plethora of long standing agreements.

_{† datacentres is a real word but just doesn't look right. Peculiar.}

Yolk's on you – eggs break less when they land sideways

Small quibble...

The drop height was measured according to fig. 2(b) from the bottom of the shell to the impacted surface rather than from the egg's centre of mass.

The CoM to surface distance minus the distance from the CoM to the shell surface vertically below will determine the maximum velocity just before impact.

So the an egg dropped pointy end first would potentially drop further but impact slightly earlier than one dropped lying on its side.

The paper's authors have referenced Dean Swift's seminal work on taxonomy of egg morphology but have seen fit to ignore his universal if not uncontroversial nomenclature big endian and little endian for blunt end and sharp end† respectively.

_{† only generations raised with plastic scissors etc could imagine any aspect of an egg as being sharp.}

Microsoft wants us to believe AI will crack practical fusion power, driving future AI

Re: Fusion is not "infinite free energy", sadly

Some of the fusion power could be used to convert the atmospheric CO₂ back into coal which we could bury again. Ultimately we might reduced the greenhouse gases to well below preindustrial level so that much more low grade heat could be radiated into space. Yes and Musk will ace quantum gravity.

Still you are entirely correct. Fusion isn't a magic pudding electric battery you load up with tritium and get electricity out with 100% conversion.

Practical fusion reactors will be incredibly inefficient and produce unwanted waste and contamination unlike Čapek's Karburator which initially appeared to be of the magic pudding variey.

The fusion reactor components will wear out and presumably become quite radioactive which isn't altogether that different from the waste issues current fission reactors face.

Pentagon declares war on 'outdated' software buying, opens fire on open source

Re: open source software, with contributions from developers worldwide

"So the Army and Airforce are going to be forced to use a language invented by an Admiral?"

COBOL like ADA probably wouldn't suffer from buffer overflows or use after free defects.

Hardly imagine this new lot of nongs are likely to require new software to be coded in Rust or Go or any other memory safe language. Mandating Ada never worked although AdaCores SPARK Ada derivative wouldn't be the worst choice.

As always getting a usable specification out of those newly sporting the mandated Warrior Ethos might prove definitively impossible. "Listen here! What the fuck do you actually want? I will rephrase that. What the fuck do you think you want?"

I imagine there are smiles galore in Moscow and Peking not forgetting Pyongyang where most of the code will likely be written.

How stupid can stupid get before it ceasing being just stupid but something qualitatively and not just quantitatively different and possibly completely novel? Hyperstultality? I am afraid we may well be doomed soon to find out.

Zuck ghosts metaverse as Meta chases AI goldrush

Re: Ugh.. I hope this doesn't kill VR

VR uses?

In order -

Porn

Gaming + porn

Selling kitchens + porn (No? A sheltered life?)

A bit like MacD's fries porn goes with anything.

I would have thought generative AI and VR would have been marriage made in heaven misalliance made in hell but exceeding profitable nonetheless. AI's penchant extraneous, non-contiguous limbs, heads and "other bits" while exceedingly weird, would certainly keep things fresh.

Ghost in the shell script: Boffins reckon they can catch bugs before programs run

Re: Bash compiler ?

"bag of a fag packet task"

Sometime a typo just makes it golden. :))

Google goes cold on Europe: Stops making smart thermostats for continental conditions

Re: Bollocks

Norway, it's the definition of special case when it comes to electricity.

Curious. What's Norway's particular distinction?

A quick look it seems they have the usual eurodiversity of plugs and sockets (C&F) which always seems odd to Australasians who have a one single phase (10A) type I (note to self: phase and neutral reversed in Argentina.)

How to stay on Windows 10 instead of installing Linux

At least somewhere things are looking up...

"For hoi polloi ..."

The Vulture earns kudos for omitting the redundantly prefixed "the."

God didn't have a plan for Gelsinger at Intel. Maybe there is one for his new gig, Gloo

Re: his favorite Bible verse and guiding principle is Colossians 3:23

"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God"

(Mark 10:25?)

I shouldn't have thought one needed to add AI hallucinations to the fairy tales of the literally interpreted bible.

Given someone who is rich is a modern interpolation of a rich man he might as well undergo gender reassignment rather than marching his dwarf camels through the eye of a giant needle.

Given the passage also appears in Matthew and Luke I would like to think it does go back to the historical Jesus and to be understood more deeply.

Only the most unthinking literalist would hold the kingdom of God to be be some prize postmortal Shangri-La awarded to the faithful. Fairly clearly intended to refer to a very earthly way of living in this world. And after two millennia the observation that the very wealthy are not on the whole great people when dealing with their fellows. Perhaps notable that rather than stating the impossibility, an unlikely improbability is used as not to categorically exclude a rich man from being a good man.

Personally I think I could get a live normal adult camel through the eye of a normally sized needle although I am not saying the camel would survive the operation. You can liquidize anything - camel smoothie anyone? Literally I imagine one could pass a fertilized camel ovum through the eye of a needle and given how the human equivalent is treated I could equally claim a camel had passed through the eye and on AI implantation be born and live.

"Ye cannot serve God and mammon."† Mammon really is the only significant deity worshipped in the US and the rest is hypocritical blasphemous bullshit.

_{† Matthew 6:24 KJV}

2 in 5 techies quit over inflexible workplace policies

Randstad Report

The Ranstad Report presumably referenced in the article https://www.randstad.ca/employers/workplace-insights/talent-management/2025-workplace-trends-job-market-analysis/ is a bit light on detail.

I would be interested for the tech population what age,sex,education,marital status, mortgage etc v. likelihood of leaving,

Off the top of my head I world guess the older, better educated and financially stable would be in pole position in the sod off grand pricks.

4-day work-week pilot due in tech land by early summer

"Let me locate the right wall...

The Register asked Microsoft what its plans are, if any, and a spokesperson said "let me look into this for you and let you know if we have anything to add."

"... and I'll get back to you when I've determined what shit is still sticking this week."

EU OS drafts a locked-down Linux blueprint for Eurocrats

Re: Why even have a local disk?

Sun X terminals, no local storage, runs over the network. What goes around comes around.‡

I recall NCD and most vendors' X terminals were also normally diskless.

Wasn't particularly uncommon to run Sun workstations diskless in the days when SCSI disks were a significant part of a systems cost.

Later probably more common to run them dataless† (pretty much the same configuration as is suggested in this article) but at the time mostly to reduce the load on the network.

When switched gigabit networking appeared I imagined that network data throughput would be greater than the average local disk and SAN technology (eg iSCSI) would replace local disks with central storage pools. Never really happened.

‡"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." Eccl. 1:9 KJV

_{† /, swap, ±/var local disk partitions; /usr, /home ±data file systems NFS mounted}

VanHelsing ransomware emerges to put a stake through your Windows heart

Oops...

I didn't realise there were still hosts using the .SU TLD. ;)

OTF, which backs Tor, Let's Encrypt and more, sues to save its funding from Trump cuts

I don't think the adminstration sees the problem...

"leave millions of people worldwide trapped behind authoritarian information firewalls."

as they are likely calling for EOI for information firewalls for the Mexican and Canadian borders. You don't want undocumented ideas supplanting the regime approved ones in the heads of decent Americans. /s

Linus Torvalds forgot to release Linux 6.14 for a whole day

Nowruz?

Over the weekend the Chief Penguin kicking up his heels celebrating Persian New Year with his local Iranian etc community?

Still a good sign that everyday life just got in the way and he just forgot but candidly admitted his oversight later.

23andMe's genes not strong enough to avoid Chapter 11

Re: The court will now oversee the sale of 23andMe's assets

"Welsh politician who had done one of these tests and it showed he was 2% Nigerian"

I was thinking some bronze Age tin traders from Africa going on to Cymru after Cornwall, for the rugger, but a legion of Welsh Casanovas ravishing sub Saharan Africa far more likely.

Re: The court will now oversee the sale of 23andMe's assets

But, it's my DNA not theirs

But is it yours alone?

It's definitely shared between biological members of your family and what you might do with it can have serious impacts on them.

My personal opinion is the my genome is the most literal legacy or inheritance from my parents and forbears, and that I have a responsibility as a custodian to care for and protect it. I would never provide a sample to any DNA testing or ancestry service and only as a last resort to a medical laboratory.

Life and medical insurance corporations would dearly love to have access to the DNA of everyone just for starters.

Re: Just don't!

"Without a copy of everyone's DNA how will they detect possible Canadians?"

Easy. Canadians only possessed two of each autosomal chromosome whereas MAGA types clearly have an extra helping.

NASA rewrites Moon mission goals in quiet DEI retreat

Re: Good

spaceship filled entirely with white men heads to the stars to propagate humanity throughout the galaxy...

I pissed myself with the picture of an armada of incel filled spaceships being hurled into the void with the promise of an inexhaustible supply of scantily clad alienesses (all bearing a remarkable resemblance to Leia Organa) with whom they might freely propagate themselves. ("To boldly go where no man has gone before!" Come? :)

The Golgafrinchan solution?

Artemis being named after an ancient Greek goddess.

I imagine the NASA chaps^† who chose the name knew the other 300 million largely lacking a credible education, let alone a classical one, knew if that unwashed thought at all, they would believe it was Artemus a bloke's name (like Artemus Gordon, James West's sidekick form The Wild Wild West.)

Probably why they didn't opt for the Roman Dianna.

_{† meant inclusively.}

Re: Insane

"Doesn't make them not nuts. They still live there for a start."

One must be grateful for small mercies.

You wouldn't want boatloads of the ever so slightly not quite so nuts coming to the shores of the UK and signing up for Faredge's Reform Lunacy? And bringing their anti-vax, creationism, guns crazy ideas to boot.

Leave the blighters to the Hell they have created for themselves.

Is Washington losing its grip on crypto, or is it a calculated pivot to digital dominance?

Is Washington losing its grip...?

Pretty much a rhetorical question I would have thought.

The only thing the tossers in charge have got a grip on...

Google admits it deleted some customer data after 'technical issue'

Re: Google admits it deleted some customer data after 'technical issue'

Anyone who put their data on Google is a moron

Or is relying on the Chocolate Factory ... to "lose it."

Microsoft tastes the unexpected consequences of tariffs on time

If they could, they wouldn't...

"Nobody at Microsoft has read The Good Soldier Švejk, quite possibly ... because none of them can read."

Although the contemporary antics of Microsoft and the Nation that produced it could have been scripted by Alfred Jarry.

"Post-literate?"

I suspect illiterate is more accurate. One doesn't usually describe mediaeval serfs as post-literate nor the Greek peasants listening to a recitation of the Odyssey following the late Bronze Age collapse.

Feds charge three over Molotov attacks on Tesla sites in multiple states

I Wonder Where This Bit Came From?

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends,^† it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it."

Are we near yet?

_{† Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.}

Museum digs up Digital Equipment Corporation's dusty digital equipment

Very Curious

"The Alpha chipset continued to evolve in China, I have been told by my old Singapore contacts."

if factual.

Dearly love to know more. ;)

Re: Progress

"Isn't this why UNIX had the split /usr directory structure?"

I suspect probably a few reasons.

When file systems weren't particularly reliable especially after power loss or kernel crashes having a small fairly static root file system/partition probably meant a better chance of fsck fixing the file system on boot instead of a rescue/restore.

When Sun et al. put workstations on networks which could then share file systems (NFS, RFS) and understanding SCSI and IPI disks were small (MB) and expensive that it was fairly common to configure diskfull workstations with a local root file system, swap, possibly /var and /home with the /usr NFS mounted read only from a server.

For diskless workstations each NFS mounted an individual root, etc but shared a single NFS mounted /usr.

With sharing between different Sparc hardware you had the added complexity of /usr/kvm.

Grand days lad, I'm thinking we'll never see their like again. (Lad thinking: We must be thankful for small mercies. ;)

NASA's inbox goes orbital after email mishap spams entire space industry

I can see it...

One Act Tragedy - Much To Undo About Everything

Doge nong: "What do you do around here boy?"

Greybearded Sysadmin: "Hell I spend every working hour just stopping shit happening."

Doge nong: "You're obviously not with the program. Definitely not hardcore. You're outa here boy!"

[Exuent Greybeard to a well deserved, long overdue retirement and the Nong to his just desserts.]

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

Re: I definitely need new glasses

The Boss is peeing over my shoulder

I wondered where he^† ended up.

_{† advisedly. She is another story entirely.}

Quantum Computing

"We have here a Schrödinger's firmware situation,"

"The box ... it is both dead and alive. However, once I power cycle it, it will be one or the other – and most likely dead."

In the Many Worlds Interpretation there must be one world where every firmware update (ultimately) succeeded which is possibly the best evidence against that interpretation.

Although I have noticed once I have finally got one difficult firmware (bios) update to finally work identical hardware just falls into line. Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields?