Posts by Bebu sa Ware

Democrats demand to know WTF is up with that DOGE server on OPM's network

Re: Fishy

Elon is pretty tech savvy

What? One of us must have gone down the wrong leg of the trousers of time.

I have dealt with reasonably knowledgeable IT staff that I couldn't really trust to set up a mail server (even just a relay or MXer) and certainly not to do so securely or resiliently.

If the likes of DOGe boy came near any of my systems the lack of an open window would present only a minor impediment.

The current scourge are not clever, not intelligent, not knowledgeable but are cunning as the proverbial shithouse rat and whose only talent is deception which sadly is dangerously potent with a population that wants to be deceived.

Re: The end is here

Though I did find 3p (this is true)

3d? Threepenny (thruppence) at face value worth 1¼p. Back in 2019 the Mint offered 120,000 George V 3d coins (=£1500?) for sale so I don't imagine the trey being a rare beast.

The only advantage to non cash payments has been amount shrapnel I don't now collect. I could never be bothered carting coins around so at one stage I had a plastic bucket full of 1¢ and 2¢ coins which I couldn't lift worked out more than $200 when the poor sod who inherited it took it to the bank.

Re: Aren't Government employees neutral.

This really does show that that the swamp needs drained

And fumigated?

Arm gives up on killing off Qualcomm's vital chip license

Re: Way to trash your brand!

"We have plenty of examples of bad management in our post-war industries, and frankly pointing them out is almost a hobby for some!".

I suppose trainspotting is more rewarding than flushing out unicorns.

Not too many examples of middling or even competent management let alone whiff of excellence in any arena I suspect.

The UK isn't exactly alone in that.

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

Language wars so last century...

If you find Rust syntax hard to understand,

That is a question that could be answered. Does the syntax and semantics of Rust place an excessive cognitive load on the coder or reader compared with other languages?

that's a you problem.

Only in simplistic sense as any language that is "too hard" will wither without new recruits.

Calling it garbage because you have no idea how to read it

A fair enough but amusing in that Rust doesn't use garbage collection but shouldn't in principle produce garbage.

just shows off your own limitations

Anyone who admits having no limitations immediately displays at least one. ;)

Even though for me looking at Rust code ranks with reviewing a page of Snobol IV, I am encouraged by Rust specific projects like RedoxOS putting early runs on the board. As they say nothing succeeds like success.

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

Re: Not really a time to be owning a Tesla

Tesla ... "that of being driven by a total wanker."

Given neither hand is on the steering wheel I can see the clear need for FSD.

T not just for Tesla, Tosser is in the running.

Ferdinand Porche?

Disappointed you didn't add a photo of Musk illustrating how high sales will be when (if) FSD gets approved in Europe.

I suppose Space Karen might be viewed as a latter day Porche.

In any case I can believe many Europeans are not overjoyed at the prospect of owning a swasTi car or at least wouldn't give a fylfot.

I believe it's a similar situation in AU where Tesla is losing market share to other marques especially to those offering plug-in hybrids although EVs are still a small proportion of all auto sales.

Google: How to make any AMD Zen CPU always generate 4 as a random number

Re: There is absolutely no problem here.

I am not a number I am a free man!

Given the world today I think if I were in No.6's predicament I would think being stuck in Portmeirion, with plenty of whisky and around the second episode I think an enthusiastic young woman turned up, so not too shabby.

Re: There is absolutely no problem here.

"Wikipedia says 0 is an integer"

I suspect some confusion between natural numbers ℕ and non negative integers ℤ_≥0

From pure maths course nearly 50 years ago I recall Peano postulates every natural number has a successor and that there exists a natural number that is not the successor of any number. Originally this was "1" but later "0" - but if it's a real concern one can take the lead from thermodynamics which is blessed with a zeroeth law in addition to the first, second and third.

Von Neumann once stated "Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin."

Re: This is possibly what you were alluding to, but to elaborate...

x86-compatible "wrapper" around a sort-of-RISC-style non-native-x86 core

Agnor Fog's optimisation resources https://agner.org/optimize/ especially the x86 microarchitecture document https://www.agner.org/optimize/microarchitecture.pdf makes fascinating reading.

User microcodeable processors would be interesting to experiment with ... sort of one step up from FPGAs but I imagine the coding to optimise register renaming and pipeline management might be challenging. I could imagine a (just in time?) compiler that produces optimised microcode for an application but I suppose that is pretty much the RISC idea.

Oracle starts laying mines in JavaScript trademark battle

Any day now...

the loony in chief will take US out if the WIPO and declare all non domestic patents, copyrights and trademarks void which would reciprocally void US patents etc in the jurisdictions of affected rights holders.

Doubtless he will also insist on withdrawing the US from the UN Law of the Sea and the ICC - at least until some non-loony informs the dill that the US aren't a signatory to these conventions.

Can't wait for the fool to insist on the relocation of the NATO headquarters to Strelsau.

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Microsoft has stuck to its guns

wiser heads would have spiked their cannon and buggered off (retreated) unless the prospect being sliced up by a cavalry sabre was attractive.

FuriPhone FLX1: A Debian-powered brick that puts GNOME in your back pocket

USD550?

These days that's around AUD880 which is more than the total I have spent on all the phones I have owned. Reasonable as I only used the things to (rarely) make calls or send texts but only basically to receive both but even then mostly the fairly pointless 2FA texts that various entities insist on.

A shoe phone with a rotary dialer is starting to look pretty attractive with the added advantage that one would take a great deal more care to avoid stepping into canine excreta.

Re: get away from using Android

Shame that Australia's batshit mobile phone laws banned mine and I had to flog it.

I assume your phone wasn't detected as supporting 4G VoLTE when the 3G networks were turned off at the end of 2024.

Otherwise readers not so blessed as to reside in God's own country might be imagining that, as consequence of a Hendra virus† control program, you were provoked to take the cat o' nine tails to your phone.

The VoLTE thing was a bit hit or miss as my cheap and cheerful Nokia failed with an prepaid Audi SIM (so no voice calls but oddly SMS worked) but passed with a Telstra SIM. Adding insult to injury my very cheap and decidedly nasty phone continued to work fine.

_{† a virus transmitted from batshit that is typically Australian being rather lethal but fortunately restricted to AU}

Palantir designed to 'power the West to its obvious innate superiority,' says CEO

Mordor talk

recalling these seeing stone were ultimately controlled by Sauron.

"The West" which is what exactly?

"innate" usually mean inborn or from birth which implies the preceding is a biological (?) entity capable of reproduction

"obvious" to whom?

"superiority" in what way superior and in comparison with who or what?

I would have thought anything superior about a vaguely defined West would be its not giving the least credence to this dangerous nonsense.

These days looks like the one ring is on Saruman's finger. :(

US senator wants to slap prison term, $1M fine on anyone aiding Chinese AI with ... downloads?

Re: Regards the UK...

The difference between filth and erotica has always been the person consuming it.

I imagine it can be both hence "down and dirty." Contemporary smut's greatest offence is the total lack of imagination or originality but then I suppose just reflecting reality.

It does seem that the media and politicians think that AI image generation is just an advanced form of collage, in which case scissors and glue are the next target.

The juxtaposition of the words "politician" and "think" is ungrammatical in the extreme forbidden by syntax and unsupportable by any assignment of semantics. Mention "collage" you get at best "What? Oxford or Cambridge?" You're a braver man than I if you're contemplating exposing these wallies to scissors and glue.

A simple Gedankenexperiment is to imagine an AI based application that amongst other things can synthesise legal NVE video footage.

So far so good as this already exists in some form - I imagine the spontaneously sprouting extraneous limbs and appendages can only keep things fresh.

The human cast being machine synthesised could be parameterized by skin, eye and hair colours, height and weight, vital statistics† ... you get the idea but wait and... age so that merely changing 18 into 17 you cross this ridiculous line.

So much of this nonsense is perilously close to Orwellian "thoughcrime" but I suspect Blair's premonitory warnings are instead today's playbook.

_{† eg ginger hair shingled bob, diamond face, green eyes, 180cm, 90-60-90cm, 68kg, 27 years etc etc or whatever melts your butter.}

Re: Regards the UK...

Let's just ban hands. Nothing bad can happen without those.

Actually the offending bit of anatomy is a normally bit lower but easily reachable as politicians frequently demonstrate.

Reminded me of the obligatory† dis-arming of the Jackelian King before his ascending the throne in Stephen Hunt's The Court of the Air

I am sure Musk's Neurolink could implant the capability to control your naughty software to replace any lopped extremities.

_{† also surgical}

The Times they are...

a-deranging.

And I daresay "the curse, it is cast."

UK govt must learn fast and let failing projects die young

Another feature of successful innovators is their ability

to avoid detection and prosecution before successfully flogging an even sillier idea to the even more gullible.

The unsuccessful innovator is likely doing 10 in the Fed. pen.

Lightsail space tech gets tailwind from Caltech breakthrough

Re: How many femtoNewtons in a femtoWales?

The research team recorded a radiation pressure force of 70 fN (femtonewton or 10 [to the −15 newtons]) from a laser with the power of 110 Watts per centimeter squared, [...]

«What's the official Register unit of force?»

The Norris [No] apparently 1.0 cNo = 1N (or for the heathen or the faredge rabble~0.225 lbs force)

So 70 fN = 70x10^-15 N = 70x10^-17 No ie 700.0 aNo (attoNorris)

The Caltech press release states the "sail" was a 40 μm square so 1.6 nm² or 0.077 nWales† thus the pressure would be 700.0 aNo/0.077 nWales or 9.1 μNo/Wales.

(I imagine the locals would apply more pressure to their native soil after a successful Dragons try against All Blacks at Cardiff Arms.)

The units of 100W per sq cm apart from being in themselves a daft choice is a power density - power [Watts] per area [square metres] W/m² but el Reg irresponsibly doesn't have a unit for energy let alone power but Norris.linguine and Norris.linguine.sec^-1 should respectively serve or badgers.C_sheep² and Norris.C_sheep etc.

Conversion of seconds into nanoTruss or microScaramucci all too ephemeral especially the second for y.t. and doesn't correspond meaningfully with linguine.C_sheep^-1

FWIW I think the "special strings" were special (silicon nitride) springs not some putative entity in a theory of everything (or of anything [at all]).

_{† The official abbreviation W is easily confused with Watts, Wa might be preferable or Cy for Cymru}

Privacy Commissioner warns the ‘John Smiths’ of the world can acquire ‘digital doppelgangers’

Re: Don't they have the equivalent...

Former PM Bob Hawke tried to introduce a national ID card once. It was to be called the Australia Card. We told him to bugger off.

We told him (myself included) what his lot could do with their Australia Card ... the internal injuries probably haven't yet fully healed after four decades since neither side have attempted anything similar.

Actually having ones identify spread around multiple documents like a driver's licence, passport, tax file number, Medicare card etc etc is in many ways more secure than having a single universal credential.

Probably means parents should be casting their nets further when considering baby's name.

I don't imagine many of Space Karen's offsprings' given names colliding with another child.

X Æ A-Xii † (originally X Æ A-12) justification for patricide I would have thought

I suspect Exa Dark Sideræl and Techno Mechanicus might have settled for Cynthia and Timothy. ;)

_{† which I would punt on pronouncing Zar-ax-ee-eye but is probably just plain Smith}

US datacenters in for shock as Canada mulls cutting the juice over Trump tariffs

I wonder...

Whether the good people of Vermont and Maine might consider rejoining the Empire Commonwealth either as separate dominions or part of Canada?

Non resident monarchs, unlike contemporary resident populist heads of state, have the advantage of rarely requiring their rings to be kissed.

Trump scrubs all mention of DEI, gender, climate change from federal websites

When do they start burying the scholars [alive]

We already have the barrels of rotting fish.

CompSci teacher sets lab task: Accidentally breaking the university

dhcping

Given demonstrator Don is now a Professor this could have happen 30 years ago or longer if he meant Unix rather than Linux. In any case campus networks pre 2000 were pretty rough and ready. Pay way too low to attract or retain networking experience or talent - it was the .com boom so just knowing the difference between 10Base2 and 10BaseT made you an expert.

This disaster movie was pretty common once consumer wifi routers were petty cash purchases.

Students would bring in their old routers to connect their phone or notebook to the local LAN for internet access or figured, logically I suppose, that the RJ45 LAN ports were as good as switch as any for offices chronically under provisioned with Ethernet ports.

These renegade DHCP servers were a nuisance interfering with departmental servers but given those two redundant servers were a lot faster than the consumer grade rubbish, clients normally got or renewed a legitimate lease (every 6 hours.) The departmental LAN was strictly firewalled from the campus network so little risk of a visitation from the glaring tech.

Usually running dhcping to flush out these blighters and arpwatch to detect new devices on the network. Being able to track the MAC address to the switch port and thence to the physical location lent one an air of omniscience which encouraged good behaviour.

Needless to say when it came to connecting unauthorised equipment to the network the staff were the worst offenders having lost their innate fear of heights and open windows.

The last rogue DHCP server I encountered a few years ago was an i-phone bridged through a desktop onto the local wired network. I never knew the details as it was quickly located by others, using the MAC address I provided, who never revealed the who, what and where.

As Trump slugs Canada, Mexico and China with tariffs, industry groups hope trade war weapon isn’t pointed at their feet

Re: It's all in how you look at it

Premier of Ontario

I was reading this morning that the provincial govt owns the single liquor wholesaler which after current stocks of US alcohol runs out won't restock.

Australasia hasn't yet felt the warmth of this Trump "tough love†" but even if it doesn't happen overnight, I am sure it will happen. The inconvenient truth the balance of trade with AU is very much in the favour of the US is an irrelevant detail to the blithering idiots that Americans have seen fit to surrender their nation and sanity.

I understand America doesn't have monopoly on nutjobs as a house in the neighbourhood is displaying signage with the orange jobbies' mug and the words "take back America." I'll be buggered but I am fairly confident His Majesty King Charles, as daft as might have once seemed, really doesn't want augment his dominions with another 50 states chock full of fractious lunatics. As the King famously said "I am not that stupid."

I suspect the householder is actually a cowardly American too frightened to live in the America that he strived to create. Or another #@$! deranged South African émigré.

I can see both Australia and Mexico being able to capture the Canadian market for fruit and vegetables‡ that until now America supplied. Australian and New Zealand wines are as good as the Californian products if not better and there are some pretty decent South American vineyards too.

_{† in this context perhaps I mean "rough trade."}

_{‡ indicative of this idiocy is that AU imports significant quantities of cherries, table grapes, citrus and other produce from the US during the local off season.}

Microsoft vet laments a world where even toothbrushes need reboots

No. Can't you get a crash helmet that's just a crash helmet any more?

Not a rider but I imagined a helmet was to preserve enough to make identification of the bits easier.

Head up displays in automobiles are distracting enough I cannot imagine how much more so in a bicycle helmet.

I guess "you pays your money and you makes your choice." Unfortunately the second part is rapidly disappearing.

Re: Mental

«I had a very marked improvement in dental health once I start using electric toothbrushes.»

Ditto. Especially gum health.

«I encourage you to give it a shot.»

Do.

I never noticed any difference between the ~AUD25 and the ~AUD100 models (neither required rebooting.)

The only complaints are that each brush head is about AUD5 (20% of the handle) and the NiMH are not replaceable when they cease to hold a charge.

Having taken a hacksaw to $25 one I could see there isn't much to see - certainly no Pi Pico. I imagine an analogue switching circuit to control the electromechanical side and a 2 minute timer - the charging circuit is probably very basic only turns off the brush motor when charging.

I suppost I could remove the dead cell and wire up a USB socket and run it off 2A USB power pack.

I noticed a good while ago the corresponding devices for rebooting things in the bedroom department were already heading down that slippery slope. Already incorporating a WiFi or BT interface and I suppose a phone app to control the various parameters of pleasure available.

Rebooting I should think the Windows startup audio and the extended boot time might be bit of a passion killer.

Googlers asked if they'd like to bury themselves next to Stadia, Chromecast, DropCam

Aren't Hardcore Enough?

Just what no one needs right now... The other tech obscenities following Space Karen's† demented playbook.

_{† given his latest penchant for suspect arm strokes the tosser might prefer Karen von Weltraum (presumably Gräfin)}

Windows 11 stages a comeback – still miles behind older sibling

running a cut-down version of Slackware

cut-down

That's the magic!

A really basic GUI, obvious buttons or icons for the email app, word processor, browser etc and an equally basic GUI file manager that you can keep unchanged for the long haul - then you are done.

Choose the particular applications that historically haven't substantially changed their user interfaces - this is more difficult as even Firefox has undergone disruptive changes but in many cases the application can be reconfigured to reproduce a "classic" interface.

Don't be deceived into believing that the person requiring such an arrangement is any way deficient. Have a long hard think about contemporary computer user interfaces and the required work flows to complete the most basic of tasks and ask yourself who is the defective one?

This is perhaps more obvious to a command line cowboy like y.t. who is frequently flummoxed when forced, kicking and screaming, to resort to a GUI interface.

We have the peculiarly named "feature" phone for those of us who only ask of a phone the feature to make and to receive calls perhaps augmented by the odd text (SMS.)

Perhaps a market exists for a "feature" PC whose flagship feature would be the exclusion of any AI followed by a simple relatively intuitive interface that is guaranteed not to substantially change

Windows the Feature Edition? Windows FE and I can hear the flapping of pigs' wings. Windows FF, fully f'd actually available now.

Re: MS keep acting like it's their computer

"Some folks you just have to have a wall around the garden."

Sometimes by court order.

Re: Don't panic

Any change is disruptive,

A really fundamental and universal observation that eludes many of our "betters" that are unaccountably held to be clever.

Any change can result in one of three (subjective) states - better, worse, the same.

One would assume one would only be interested in the first case when contemplating change (idiots and the malignant exempted.)

Any potential change presents a barrier against which resource must applied to overcome. If this weren't the case the contemplated change would have already occurred spontaneously.

So given any change incurs a cost which might be recouped by a benefit, the wise would first evaluate the potential benefits and weigh any such against the costs - otherwise known as a cost/benefit analysis. The projected benefits could be predominantly resource recovery in which case a cost/cost analysis would be appropriate.

Clearly there exists a rational, measurable framework within which change can be considered and managed. What do we observe? Mostly we find ourselves surrounded by disgusting walls bespattered by fæces which not sticking are slinking down the wall.

I imagine Cory Doctorow's coinage would encompass most of the modern world's approach to change.

'Abandoned' astro takes recordbreaking ninth spacewalk

Re: Astros?

Since when has the word astronaut been abbreviated to 'astro'?

I guess it's also now cosmos, taikos, vyomas and spatios?

Ijon Tichy would not be amused, I am sure.

As for "since when" I would suggest since a large number of "qualified" adults voted for a chap that no one could seriously trust even to open a packet of crisps.

If I were one of the pair on the ISS I might well be pondering the fate of cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev.

You begged Microsoft to be reasonable. Instead it made Copilot reason-able with OpenAI GPT-o1

1001 Nights?

I am sorry but Mustafa Suleyman and "I urge you to give it a try. It’s truly magical" immediately bring to my fevered imagination a picture of a second hand flying carpet salesman in Harun al-Rashid's Bagdad.

To my mind trusting AI is not unlike flying on a second hand threadbare persian carpet at 3000m (10,000'.)

AI has already been likened to releasing a djinni from its bottle and most of those stories don't have anything as pleasant as Barbara Eden materializing. Even The Brass Bottle† also has a salutary lesson or two.

_{† I Dream of Jeannie was inspired by the 1964 film of the 1900 novel.}

You're going to do what to the feature? Microsoft defines what it means by 'deprecation'

Re: Status quo.

Then they'll look at the cost of a new PC, and a lot of them will run away to Android tablets.

Very true. Even name brand 300mm/12" tablet comes in a bit cheaper than a lot of AI contaminated Win11 notebooks. Only gets worse for US residents with the new trumped up tariffs.

I notice here a decent ex-Govt refurbished (DELL, Lenovo etc) notebook or desktop with Win10 is easily under AUD400 (USD250) - the Win11 boxes are not any more expensive. The refurbisher just installs the latest version of Windows supported by the hardware.

Of course there will be a lot of very cheap hardware that cannot run Win11 when Win10 is gone - happened when the Win7 OEM licensed could no longer be used to activate Win10. From that I got some rather nice micro PCs which are now happily running Linux and FreeBSD.

Re: I don't mind what they mean by it...

Given the defecatory nature of the product, the literate Tudor might have preferred fenestrae merdarum although unlike my literate forbears, I am buggered what the locative of modern Redmond should be (redmondii?)

As for Unix being handed to Moses alternative popular opinion suggests soprano Unix originated from the palace harem in which tenor Multics had previously been "inducted."

Welsh woman fined for flatulence-fueled cyber harassment

Gee, not the brightest bulb in there.

Inescapably given the story I suppose, brought "gas light" to mind but clearly this lamp's flame had been extinguished.

I believe uncombusted coal gas used to pong a bit.

Re: Just, how?!?

« ...holding her smartphone camera to her rear end, farting into it while smirking throughout.

How does that even work?»

My thought exactly.

All I could imagine was that she had her head thrust well between her legs at the time which, while speaking to some gymnastic athleticism, is rather a case of being hoisted by one's own petard, I would have thought.

Although as a story I would have kept the dead donkey. The flatulence was quite incidental to the harrassment using a carrier service. I imagine if she were to recite The Tay Bridge Disaster to her victim she would have received a stiff but well deserved custodial sentence. The same delivered in Welsh would deserve the black cap.

Reminds me of a certain head of state whose lips typically form a rounded sphincter shape prior to his dumping another load of falsehood laced bullshit on his adoring acolytes usually bookended by an insufferably smug smirk.

Arrr! Can a sailor's marlinspike fix a busted backplane?

Captain Horatio Pugwash?

I don't know how our Horatio restrained himself. I would have been well into a "talk like a pirate" routine.

I can think of a few uses for a marlinspike but decent oak or brass belaying pin could be even more useful for administering some percussive encouragement to recalcitrant devices and attitude readjustment to other tools.

_{The BBC short animations Pugwash animations from the early '60s are a fond childhood memory.}

Asteroid as wide as 886 cans of spam may hit Earth in 2032

"moving away from Earth at 17.32 km/s "

Meaning of course that it was hurtling towards the earth at 17320 m/s just before it took the bypass.

½mv² means that each 340g can of SPAM packs about 51 MJ a bit more than its nutritional 4.4kJ (1047kcal.) 695 million tins† would pack 35.4PJ (35443TJ) which as the writer stated is about 8 megatons.

Given the Earth hurtles along at 30km/s have be grateful it's not a head on in the offing (I assume asteroid is actually clocking 30+17.3 km/s.)

By 2032 the current adminstration will have stuffed up NASA along with everything else so it's likely we won't see it coming.

I noticed that the favoured impact sites don't include mainland US - manifest destiny I suppose.

_{† that's 236000 tonnes of pig meat or perhaps 800000 pigs - a bit of a bugger if they were to land in the Middle East, I imagine.}

Even Windows 10 cannot escape the new Outlook

Re: I'm sorry, *what*?

"Have no clue about what they are talking about."

Could be the Microsoft corporate motto although it's the leitmotif running through the entire industry.

IBM seeks $3.5B in cost savings for 2025, discretionary spend to be clipped

"lack of skilled labor [and] supply chain"

I suspect the interpolated "and" was redundant as I imagine this CEO really was thinking of a "skilled labor supply chain" and is hoping for a lot more of the right sort of visas from the new administration. The creation of the skilled labour is probably stalling everywhere in the face of industry wide layoffs with an obvious lack of investment in skilling of any sort.

Not entirely sarcasticly I often imagine these fine chaps would be more than happy to dispense with the 13th Amendment (the other two reconstruction amendments could go too.)

And now something fun for a change: Building blocks of life in Bennu asteroid samples

Life...

It would appear that you will get nucleotides and amino acids forming in quite challenging environments with possibly a smidgen of water as a prerequisite. These conditions must exist over most of the Universe and unless the step from these precursors to even the most primatitive life forms is impossibly unlikely it would follow that the Universe is teeming with life even if we restricted ourselves to life based on nucleic and amino acids.

If we find evidence of life on Mars either now or in the distant past I think we might have some confidence that the emergence of life is not impossibly unlikely.

I find this thought an ember of optimism in these pessimistic times.

Guess who left a database wide open, exposing chat logs, API keys, and more? Yup, DeepSeek

Re: Amateur hour at Clickhouse

What database doesn’t come with at least some basic auth enabled out of the box?

Maybe. Thirty plus years ago I seem to recall Oracle (V5?) had a default oracle/oracle user/password which wasn't exactly a high bar.

Actually heartening to read that our Chinese brothers have caught up with our western standards of deplorable IT security. ;)

Re: Missed opportunity

«President Winnie the Pooh of China quoted in the South China Morning Post as saying "Down with the yankee imperalist lackey Eeyore!"»

Bit hard on Eeyore. He might not be the sharpest tool in shed but if he is indeed a Yankee he certainly has got his compatriots down to a T.

"No brain at all, some of them, only grey fluff that’s blown into their heads by mistake, and they don’t think."†

_{† The House at Pooh Corner - AA Milne. Chapter I (In which A House Is Built at Pooh Corner for Eeyore)}

Garmin pulls a CrowdStrike, turns smartwatches into fancy bracelets

Doesn't surprise me

The only experience I ever had with a Garmin device was a car GPS. I finally gave up when it couldn't navigate from Christchurch to Tekapo. I was prepared to accept its inadequacy in getting from the airport to a CBD hotel as Garmin's maps had obviously not been updated since the earthquake (nearly 10 years previously.) After an hour or two running around the back blocks of Canterbury I ended up using the map in the GPS in the same way I would use a paper map to navigate.

The Garmin was lucky it didn't end up at the bottom of Milford Sound but it is probably still mouldering at the bottom of a heap of the usual assorted obsolete phone chargers, cables and cases commonly to be found in an op (charity) shop.

I was reminded of this yesterday by an email from my health insurer offering discounts on Garmin fitness devices.

Having seen the usual suspects in their designer fitness fashion pounding the pavement (thinking knee joint replacements) I rather think plugging their watches into a computer to delete a file ranks with porcine aviation in feasibility apart from fact the most deficient would be wearing Apple devices (or at a pinch Samsung.)

Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise

Interesting

I was surprised the Theosophical Society's archive were stored in CA.US as I would have imagined India or possibly London.

Don't encounter Theosophy much nowadays but was a bit more pervasive a century ago. Even the subsequent Mary Poppins† books had elements of their ideas in them. Having just read Sax Rohmer's Grey Face it just occurred to me while reading this article that there was also a fair serving in that title‡.

The tragedy is that these incinerated documents will destroy literary evidence of the links between Theosophy and the writers, artists, intellectuals and leaders of that time which would likely restrict our understanding leading to even more unfortunate misinterpretations of the history of the early twentieth century. They were crazy irrational times which resonate with our own.

Digital archiving just doesn't happen in most organisations. Purely as a matter of form, records or data is often retained in unsatisfactory accommodation on media for short lived technologies eg Magneto-optical drives often in peculiar formats. Filing cabinets of zip drives, 8"/5.25"/3.5" floppies etc etc.

Paper records often aren't treated any better.

I am amused by the the fact that nearly 50 year old microfiche indifferently stored can still be reliably read with what is a rather low tech fiche reader. I assume this is also the case with microfilm. The lesson is that access technology has to be persistent.

History would suggest sheep skin vellum and oak gall ink is a long term archival technology. :)

_{† P.L.Travers' friendship with A.E.Russell is the connection.Less so with George Gurdjieff}

_{‡ Arthur Henry Ward was apparently immersed a wide variety of mysticism and Theosophy}

AI revoir, Lucie: France's answer to ChatGPT paused after faux pas overdrive

"cow's eggs as a nutritious food source"

Probably are. Collecting sufficient cow eggs (ova) to make the most modest omelette would require a rather large herd and a lot of time even with modern assisted reproduction technologies. (Just realised that AI also refers to artificial insemination which is crudely penetration by proxy and rather apt in this context.)

The messy details can be found in this paper Observations on the Size of Bovine Ova but this putative if unusual source of nutrition clocks in at around 170μm in diameter so roughly 2.6×10^-12m³ so a bit smaller than say a 60g hen's egg which might be roughly 60cc (mL) or 60×10^-6m³

So one would need to collect about twenty million of them for a miserly one egg omelette.

_{Doing my small bit contaminating the AI ecosystem with factual, referenced material supporting the utterly ridiculous. Looking forward to seeing ChatGPT recommending bison caviar and crème fraîche on a buckwheat blini}

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Most requirements are pretty basic.

From my observations over the years the average user really only uses email, a word processor and web a browser to any great extent.

The required feature sets in these applications are also pretty minimal. Anything more complex than Wordpad is usually a source of confusion as no document more complicated than a business letter is ever contemplated - so Libreoffice is not the greatest option here. Email clients in some ways worse - anything more complicated than Eudora only confuses. I have tried foisting Evolution and Thunderbird on to users but most prefer to use the web interface (yuck!) I have used Evolution ever since I couldn't get Alpine to do OAuth2 with Gmail and it's not too bad but a bit confusing in parts. I recall one chap seriously challenged in the upstairs department could constructively use PC-Pine when Eudora and Outlook (Express?) defeated him.Even browsers are becoming "feature encumbered."

Users and in fact everyone, are best prevented from using spreadsheets and presentation applications altogether.

Chromeboxes seemed to be a move in the right direction but the hardware, while inexpensive, was often underpowered and not of a particularly high quality and being another Chocolate Factory ecosystem didn't help. Oddy enough I have an HP Chromebook that now runs Mint quite nicely and previously Win10 would also run usuably - for whatever reason Chrome OS was always pretty clunky but a Win7 user found it quite usable.

Sweden seizes cargo ship after another undersea cable hit in suspected sabotage

Re: Brown trouser time

"But a submarine wouldn't sink a merchant vessel without surfacing, inspecting its papers and giving the crew time to evacuate - that would be a war crime."

Is it? German U boats did this in both 20th century conflicts but I don't recall reading of any subsequent prosecutions.

I sometimes wonder if the Ukraine issued letters a marque to enterprising privateers whether Putin's oil trade might be significently hindered.

Curious fact: the US last issued letters of marque in 1941 to of all craft a blimp - the previous letters were issued during the War of 1812.

US freezes foreign aid, halting cybersecurity defense and policy funds for allies

Re: Inmates and asylums come to mind

"Sadly, I think the inmates would be less malicious and might do a better job."

You are not wrong there except for the inmates plastering their shit all over the walls.

Hang on! You're not wrong and leave it at that.