Posts by Bebu sa Ware 2773 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Nov 2024
My Eco-Drive... cold dead wrist.
Grandad's "wind-o-matics" sort of needed a daily recharge (rewind) but the luminous Radium dial was a worry* - he got it before he went off to France for the 1914-18 shindig so was probably quite useful in the trenches.
* our school lab's geiger counter went berserk when I tested his watch.
The link to the '96 Wired article was incredibly interesting.
The statement by Steve Deering
"How about we come up with something *completely *brain-damaged. Then maybe the computer guys will notice.'"
could be profitably applied to many recent "innovations."
In the late '90s there were two University Campuses in AU that ran IP over ATM which was so successful that, after the lot was replaced in the noughties, one of the remaining complicit networking chaps denied its ever being deployed but forgot that he had documented the campus deployment on personal Uni web pages.
Back then DEC OSF/1 had a kernel module that implemented classical IP over ATM which I had the misfortune to have to deal with. Its ability to cause random or acausal kernel panics would have been envied by Microsoft's Windows engineers.
I don't think IP broadcasts played nicely with IP over ATM networks which could have been a problem for some legacy networking a protocols.
In any case I think the netheads won. I believe most telephony, or at least LTE, is now carried over IP.
Given that it was as much a packet v. circuit argument I suspect the last page hasn't been written.
"fixing what wasn't particularly broken"
Windows and accomplices just generally borken then?
While I still had infrequent occasions to use a Windows box to test services I invariably installed Classic Shell for my own sanity. At other times when I was confronted with a stock standard Win 10 box I was always appalled anew by the UI.
Being a minimalist by nature and wanting as few distractions as possible my window managers have been 9wm (hpux10.2), oroborus (hpux,linux) and now openbox with cwm being a contender - the contrast is stark - windows is just one enormous monolithic distraction.
Grok AI bot of a snail wearing a suit that he [Musk] said was the result of his asking it to "draw a picture of Gary Gensler."
A whole adminstration that ought to spend the next fifty months on the naughty step.
From the archives of "being careful of what you ask for," requesting Grok to generate an image of Musk might visualise Space Karen as an overbearing, oversized and overfed garden slug* with a Tesla T as a (forked) tongue.
* which is essentially an exceedingly thin skinned snail sans suit.
Popular with the science community because it had a full-fat equation editor.
I would have thought LaTeX would have been de rigueur with that lot back then (v3.14? ;) or DWB and eqn.
I do remember the typing pool (remember those) adored WP especially those typing from a dictaphone. At 120 wpm not having the fingers leave the keyboard is a real advantage. When it came to the printers there was a lot of unladylike language. ;)
"voice is locked on Upper Class Twit instead of Stoned Queensland Girl like my last phone"
Boris Johnson v. Pauline Hanson? Sorry you meant "is stoned" not (both) ought to be.
Some visitors from the UK had a woman with a Midlands accent on their phone but surprisingly their maps instructions were terser (abrupt even) but more accurate than the local slightly west coast US accent on our phone here in AU.
I would guess changing your locale would change the voice eg en_AU if you want Pauline, en_UK for a blithering Boris but unfortunately I have no idea how to do that on a phone.
Actually, SF does have a bit of a recent history with public toilets etc
A propos of not much more than a late Poets' day afternoon the comments about public loos fired off some aging random neurons and brought to mind Clochemerle especially the 1972 BBC production narrated by Peter Ustinov (who also narrated Dr Snuggles. ;)
If you had all this electricity a decent linear motor hefting a half brick at a drone might be pretty effective or even using the power to instaneously convert an enclosed volume of air into plasma could put a decent bit of welly into any old bit junk lying around.
I wonder whether a Falconry unit might be cheaper and just as effective.
They were called 'taxis'.
I can see some dodgy entrepreneur leasing the contents of Cruise's parking lot and luring a host of undocumenteds to drive them as some overhyped rideshare service.
Of course the whole lot will collapse in a mountain of debt with Mr Dodgy have taken the loot and skedaddled.
"This bronze will never catch on. We have stone and that's good enough for Og"
Not entirely sure Og was out of his tree in that.
I imagine expertly crafted stone tools and weapons were probably still in evidence during the bronze age at least until the advent of iron.
I think that apart from gold and silver, metals weren't a feature in the pre-columbian americas but the Aztecs and Incas did seem to account for a respectable number of conquestadors.
An arrow with a stone point lodged in the heart, or stone club to the skull just as lethal as any metal weapon.
I imagine the thermal conductivity of copper and presumably bronze/brass meant its killer application was in the kitchen closely follow by its use in mirrors which must have been the bronze age equivalent of the selfie.
".. Earth's average IQ shot up, except in the US"
Average IQ probably a bit redundant here. The test scores are apparently rank ordered and scaled to a normal distribution with and arbitrary mean of 100.0 and standard deviation of 15.0 so I imagine if you extinguished all the Einsteins or Trump supporters (or both) and applied the tests to the population the average IQ would be unchanged.
Given this inbuilt futility of the IQ one would imagine it's an american invention but it is apparently German.
I am not sure the US has a monopoly on idiots as idiocy is a pretty universal deficiency but the US most assuredly has the monopoly on imbeciles with guns.
Collaborateurs! Quislings! Or just vutures?
"our staff could be helpful in rounding up others to toil at whatever tasks they require"
I am certain the commentard vulturatii would gladly scour their "little lists" (of those who would never be missed) and donate names to a rota of those others requiring rounding up.
there are a few of our contemporary 'Great and Good' they might preserve for posterity preferably until the end of the Universe (and don't bother to reboot it.)
I always imagined SUV stood for urban assault vehicle in some language other than English but thanks to the possibly unintentional educational value of the Vulture I now know SUV stands for sports utility vehicle which given the US national sport appears to be whacking fellows americans basically amounts to the same thing.
When one considers whom the US constituency have elected it is quite easy to believe these deluded souls imagining armadas of Great Wall Motors SUVs (Havals?) suspended from balloons ready to be dumped on the US market (and heads) just as the orange floridan predicted.
Space aliens might not be a bad outcome if we can convince them the US citizen is finest on hoof comestible the planet can offer to the discerning extraterrestrial palate. After wolfing down 300 million head of the finest I shouldn't be surprised if the diners all perished from some alien lifestyle disease or at least retreated without a thought of seconds.
Norris-sheep sounds like a generic term for a commons' backbencher who are definitely not known for their energy* (or intelligence.)
1 Norris-sheep = 12 rees-moggs/parliamentary-term? :)
Poking the Reg unit calculator it appears the max velocity of a sheep in vacuo appears to be .01×c. Can't you give the bleaters enough welly to get their mutton up to lightspeed or does the wool snag on the vacuum fluctuations? Found the explanation... something to do with wool drag, Welshman and interstellar space being slightly denser than the space between a Hollywood starlet 's ears.
* like a static magnetic field... exerts a force on a moving charge but doesn't do any (useful) work.
Apparently it is also possible to harvest several antpower out of the modern RF-noisy environment, using little more than an antenna and a Germanium diode..
The crystal set lives! ;) Had one when I was a kid and AM was still king - even had a chunk of galena which worked but not as well as a Ge diode.
Having only one local station I listened to a lot of Garner Ted Armstrong's slightly ridiculous prognostications in his The World Tomorrow only offset by a fair bit of classic Brit radio comedy.
For powering a satellite I would have thought there would be far more radiation up there (cosmic rays, etc) than in the ant testicle's worth of C14 embedded in the synthetic diamond.
If this diamond battery had a few more antpower,* wrist watches might be an application (Citizen Eco-drive & Seiko Solar watches are fairly popular.)
* or gnats-sweat.
Would be interesting (or revolting) to have Sora animate some of lyrics from the twelve days of Christmas viz
six geese a-laying
seven swans a-swimming
eight maids a-milking
nine ladies dancing
ten lords a-leaping
eleven pipers piping
twelve drummers drumming
With "unrealistic physics and struggling with complex actions" I am not sure that the Sora version of eight maids a-milking wouldn't require a strong stomach.
If AI (further) enshittifies movie production, live theatre might enjoy a renaissance. CGI didn't put Wallace and Gromit out of business and I can't see Ghibli embracing this excremental technology.
Not that I would touch anything remotely associated with Space Karen and certainly not a Tesla infested with dodgy software all round but I assume that it's possible to turn to this autopilot/FSD nonsense off which seem to me advisable.
Or at least some sort of advisory mode where a Kryten voice could opine "I believe, sir, that it would be advisable to avoid the fire truck ahead, or at least to engage it slightly less hastily."
Strikes me that if FSD really worked 100% of the time a Tesla packed with explosives and a store dummy in the driver's seat would make a pretty decent drone car bomb but fortunately is actually easily decoyed by a parked emergency vehicle.
In spite of it's snarkish nature the Vulture can be quite educational. I didn't know that Grainger was responsible for the 1967 Prisoner Theme.
Listening to the music again it seems it shares some similarity with the music used in the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson productions but I imagine it was a small musical world and also reflected the spirit of the time.
Curiously the only DVDs I now possess are the Prisoner (1967) and Life on Mars (2006) (but no DVD player. ;)
I supposed if every phone had a decent laser you might guarantee the recipient only views the image once but then they wouldn't be able to view anything else afterwards.
I was wondering if an image could be randomly be split into 25 separate frames that individually look like noise but when presented sequentially in one second are perceived by the viewer as the original image thanks to the persistence of vision. Even then just capturing all the frames allows the image to be reconstructed.
As a previous comment noted if a person posted a photograph that they really didn't want anyone to retain a copy they are a bit lacking in the upstairs department. Pretty obvious if it's not ok for years then it's not ok for only seconds.
If you voluntarily surrender privacy for seconds or minutes then it's a bit like virginity you don't get it back (crudely put you're f....)
used to conceal the stench of a decaying corpse.
I would be interested in the stats of the prevalence of this crap v. particular projects.
If it were it the case that projects that could provide enormous leverage through supply chain attacks or other vulnerabilities, or projects that were intrinsically security sensitive were being unduly targeted I would be deeply suspicious that an organised compaign was being waged by the usual state sponsored suspects and plain unsponsored criminals as a distraction.
The longer a real vulnerability remains undetected, unreported and unremedied the greater the opportunity for these malefactors to take advantage of the situation.
I recall reading in the documentation with Eric Isaacson's A86 shareware assembler the proceedings of an Intel meeting discussing the 8086 programming model - the whole class/group/segment, far/near shemozzle and the weird scenarios where various groups could be overlapped to permit "near" access to code or data. My thought was with clowns like these who needs a circus.
I vaguely recall A86 supported a simplified model which echoed Eric's point that Intel's classes were really groups and their groups were really segments and their segments were really pointless
If the Amiga wasn't so much more expensive than PC clones in my part of the world I would have opted for the 68000 option - the Atari ST wasn't readily available.
"#1. A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line..." unless acted in by an external force.*
To be fair sir Isaac had to invent a force to explain why moons, planets etc keep circling each other. And a dodgy story about an apple.
* Corpus omne perseverare in statu suo quiescendi vel movendi uniformiter in directum, nisi quatenus a viribus impressis cogitur statum illum mutare.
«I think I can see Intels future already.
Slowly circling the drain...»
Angular momentum being what it is, the drain circling will speed up becoming faster and faster until that final gargling sound as the last drop goes down the gurgler.
I can imagine the totally defective Administration that the clever discerning voters of the US have foisted on the rest of us and incidentally on themselves will was waste little time dismantling the Centers for Disease Control which had played such an important role in dealing with Ebola with that experience subsequently assisting with the global COVID response (if hampered by the same clowns.)
Have to wonder if United Health will deny the deceased's family's funeral benefit claim.
Grim but at the rate Americans shoot (and indiscriminately kill) each other mostly without head lines who really going to be too concerned in the land of the free.
For some reason I was under the impression "silencers" were in fact flash suppressors. For silence a Burley and Stronginthearm crossbow would be favoured (the point with a poisoned or exploding "point" for a reliable outcome.)
It's a wonder that the Ankh-Morpork Assassins Guild hasn't set up a branch office in the USofA offering designer inhumations to the great and good (or should that be for?)
even in Asia apparently.
Dear Santa could you please arrange for the training of the Xi compliant PC AI writing assistant to include lashings of A.A.Milne (and Benjamin Hoff for good measure.)
Love to see Cottleston Pie in a PRC bureaucrat's fawning Xi supplication. :)
I imagine one would need to learn to whistle if one didn't want to be classified as a fish.
if he were Mycroft then this particular episode would never have occurred.
I didn't notice whether Watson, not being the brains of the firm, found the solution or someone read the manual.
net no sh ip xxx -- No shit Sherlock.
Network engineers never were my favourite IT people partly because of this sort of brain damage. "No shut = open" verges on Newspeak double plus ungood.
《declare bankruptcy? I'm going to peg it at a pregnant 9 months...》
"you can't take the IBM out of the Kyndryl."
Any ideas as to the paternity?
I was wondering the origin of the word kyndryl - according to IBM is their neologism from kin and tendril presumably with the y for i replacement for trademark etc purposes but in old english it would have been cynn. Apparently the correct pronounciation is kin + drill but looking at the word I would have guessed cund + rule.
《Whats wrong with "sorting".》
I was also thinking that. Another uncouth left pondian coinage but the OED records the word from the 1840s so possibly an uncouth Victorian coinage. ;)
Looking at the word's definition I had the impression that sortation has more of the sense of assigning entities to exclusive categories without any idea of ordering which sorting might imply.
Although poking around the passing contents on a recycling conveyor belt does have a definite element of sortition about it. :)
Took me a few seconds to grok "dropping some kids off at the pool" but the "paper work" really wrapped it up for me. ;)
I may lead a sheltered life but that earnt my euphemism of the week award.
I assume the system used a motion sensor but clearly wasn't installed where it could best detect the same at least for those blessed with regularity.
Thermal sensors in the seat of throne should work reliably for any warm blooded human and likewise for urinals for those that use them. A bit of a bugger for the undead and cold blooded aliens but then I imagine they would have little need for the convenience.
"set to be out of focus. "
Out of focus optics will lose the phase information but your cynical suggestion that their software blurring function is almost certainly invertible is lossless is probably on the money. In this case the recordings contain blurred images but with the right software they can be deblurred during replay. The blighters could also apply some encryption in the blurring algorithm which make the blurring appear random for that extra plausible deniability sauce.
I am surprised that Boeing shareholders haven't sunk the slipper into the board, the C-suite and manglement generally commanding their sorry arses to cease ffaffing their employees about and generally stop this distracting nonsense and concentrate on again manufacturing reliable, economical, efficient aircraft which can manage to take off and land retaining the same number of doors.
Seems a challenging alternative world view but then many serious people just before the 20th century didn't believe in atoms (just ask Ludwig Boltzman.)
Seeing the world is replete with three phase excuse generators outputting electrickery who can blame the lady.
An affliction common amongst quantum mechanics I believe.
I think in this context* I think it's basically hydrogen (contaminated by a little helium) although the 1080 number comes from an author that claims chemical reactions would have created more helium, deuterium, lithium but then astronomers do insist on calling elements not hydrogen nor helium, metals. ;)
The second author with different reasoning proffers 4 x 1054 kg which if you take the mass of the proton or neutron rounded up to be around 1.675×10-27 kg then 1080 of the blighters should weigh in at 1.67×1053 kg which is roughly the same within a factor of 10 which is normally called a good result in their game I understand.
2128 = 10128 x log 2 ~ 3.4×1038 ( log (2) is ~0.3010 from the four figure tables of my school days.)
A mole contains 6.02×1023 atoms so 2128 hydrogen atoms would be 5.6×1014 moles which is only a 560 teramoles which would weigh in at a mere 560 mega tonnes. ;)
So we might have to wait for IPv7 with presumably at least 512 bit addresses before we can assign every baryon an address.
The best way to deal with an Auditor from The Thief of Time would appear to have them incarnate themselves like Myria LeJean and entrap them through sensation in the reality they purport to audit.
An affliction common amongst quantum mechanics I believe.
I think in this context* I think it's basically hydrogen (contaminated by a little helium) although the 1080 number comes from an author that claims chemical reactions would have created more helium, deuterium, lithium but then astronomers do insist on calling elements not hydrogen nor helium, metals. ;)
The second author with different reasoning proffers 4 x 1054 kg which if you take the mass of the proton or neutron rounded up to be around 1.675×10-27 kg then 1080 of the blighters should weigh in at 1.67×1053 kg which is roughly the same within a factor of 10 which is normally called a good result in their game I understand.
2128 = 10128 x log 2 ~ 3.4×1038 ( log (2) is ~0.3010 from the four figure tables of my school days.)
A mole contains 6.02×1023 atoms so 2128 hydrogen atoms would be 5.6×1014 moles which is only a 560 teramoles which would weigh in at a mere 560 mega tonnes. ;)
So we might have to wait for IPv7 with presumably at least 512 bit addresses before we can assign every baryon an address.
The best way to deal with th
