Posts by Bebu sa Ware

Microsoft starts boiling the Copilot frog: It's not a soup you want to drink at any price

"will multiply like brainworms in the cerebellum"

At the risk of channeling Beth Mole I would be thinking cerebrum rather than cerebellum.

Although MS present a fair semblance of brain death which might imply their brain worms have been partying in MS' brainstem.

Slightly paraphrasing, presumably an Encyclopædia Galactica entry under Microsoft Sirius Cybernetics Corporation:

"Genuine People Personality products were imbued with artificial intelligence and emotion, however, they are known for being pointless or irritating, often serving their desired purpose but in an unconventional or unhelpful way." (And people aren't?)

Quoting Marvin: "Ghastly, it all is. Absolutely ghastly. Just don't even talk about it."

AI poetry 'out-humans' humans as readers prefer bots to bards

"readers mistake the complexity of human-written verse for incoherence created by AI"

readers mistake the complexity incoherence of human-written verse for incoherence created by AI

After taking the poetry reading population (admittedly small in toto) and removing those who do so under coercion or compulsion such as students and editors you have a residue of largely pseudointellectuals and other poseurs... remove that detritus and apart from the poet you would have very few readers left.

As for good or bad poetry I suspect endurance is a better criterion. The overwhelming large proportion of all, presumably mediocre or ephemeral, verse has faded into well deserved obscurity unless like "The Tay Bridge Disaster" is of a sufficiently Vogonish standard to remain remarkable.

I suspect enduring verse has to evoke in reader something of the unchanging human condition which I assume is why John Donne, Shakespeare (sonnets) etc are still read.

It would be curious to see the results of turning AI loose on Beowulf, Finnesburgh Fragment, Maldon and then asking it to write some alliterative verse - in modern English - should be a decent challenge.

Re: Well, I Don't Know Much About Poetry

"Don't know what a slide rule is for,"

A slide rule is for when you can't be arsed to use log tables.

(Completed secondary schooling before electronic calculators so know both, along with vernier scales, and why haversines. ;)

Written by...

《And so that indicates that Finnegans Wake was actually written by a human being after all?!》

I always wondered whether Joyce had the OED (10 or 12 volumes) and sat at his desk with a handful of dice which determined the next word in Finnegans Wake (eg vol., sect., page, line and word) and sent his missus to scout for it.

Written by Joyce but create by chance (and possibly his missus just choosing the first word that she happened to glance rather than counting lines and words.)

I have confess I have never managed to get past page three before in exasperation conclude bugger this for a game of soldiers... reading a foreign dictionary is slightly less pointless.) For all I know Joyce might filled the rest with Lorem Ipsum.

Ulysses really is one of the landmarks of 20th Century literature - personally I would have preferred Joyce to Yeats or Shaw for a Nobel.

The beer for the fair amount of Bloomsday that was spent in pubs if I my memory serves.

Weekends were a mistake, says Infosys co-founder Narayama Murthy

Not even thinking of employees as machines

If you have a factory with a machine that produces widgets that you sell at a fairly stable price then the costs of the inputs to that machine and the efficiency of the machine in converting those inputs into widgets will determine your profitability.

If you discovered that using ACME widget machine lubricating oil significantly increased the efficiency of your machine with only a slight increase in cost you would use the ACME product to increase output and profitibility.

With knowledge economy workers the ACME product is reasonable hours.

This chap has about as much sensitivity (or sense) as a tosser with sheets of sandpaper glued to his hands.

Re: Wrong, very wrong and this chump

"You'd think one of then knows that the scary black screen is just a command prompt and the computer is not broken."

Hilarious! :)

Your affliction sounds like typewriters and monkeys to me.

Re: "I have not changed my view; I will take this with me to my grave"

"Where there will, presumably, be a queue of people waiting to dance on it"

Presumably, in 8 hour shifts. Some kind of rota might be in order.

Although he might be spared the grave dancing on Saturdays and Sundays which should set him spinning in his eternal repose.

Do people in those parts actually have graves? I imagined cremation was more the rule. So is reincarnation I suspect which I guess rather limits the repose.

Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf

You know the answer in your bones :)

"....and I still wonder how many systems have backups which have never been tested. Someone out there might be able to tell me."

A lot, lot more systems than you would like to might imagine. :(

Working in an institutions where "fat fingers" are the rule rather than the exception usually means the backups are frequently "tested."

Archives weren't routinely tested even during thekr nominal retention period. Since migration of older archives to current media and tech wasn't a thing most archives ceased to have the means to be read before anyone could determine whether they were unreadable.

You can get lucky though - I have had a complete restoration of archives from a DDS2 (DAT) tape ~15 years after they were made (the drive pulled out of the junk pile.)

Hint: don't use vendor backup/dump utiities (eg vdump, vxdump or even xfs_dump) for archives as there is a good chance you won' t have a system (tru64, hpux, sgi) to be able to read them. Gnu tar (or cpio) has served me well here. You cannot expect to have good fortune of vmsbackup where someone once created a compatible tool. (I once made one chap's day recovering his files from a very old vax vms dump tape. I didn't even laugh when he asked whether we had a vms system with a tape drive. :)

Here's how a Trump presidency could change the tech industry

"Anything could happen"

Already has. Will continue to happen pretty much all at once.

A mad woman's breakfast won't even be in the running as an adequate description of ensuing chaos.

Have to look up the meaning of Medize (and find a how-to guide) and the dial code for the PRC.

The only puzzle that remains is that in a nation fatally infested with gun crazies how is that they all are such poor shots?

Re: Here's how a Trump presidency could change the World

"See that red button there?"

So the master will have his moment too?

"How do you use a weapon of ultimate mass destruction when it can stand in judgment on you? There is only one man who would even try."

"Cometh the hour, cometh the man." Apparently a descendant of the 14th century "Opportunity makes the thief." So nothing new under the Sun.

Letting chatbots run robots ends as badly as you'd expect

"stuff your robots with vector math that's euphemistically called artificial intelligence. "

Looks more like tensors with two bit floating point. ;)

For me robots are rapidly including themselves in the same class as clowns. Definitely sinister and to be avoided at all costs.

Google Gemini tells grad student to 'please die' while helping with his homework

More honest and direct.

"You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe.

Please die. Please."

Has to be a lot cheaper and more efficient than a B-ark although I imagine Boeing might do a volume deal on one way colonizing trips to the Sun Mars. Fares gratis for Space Karen and other "special people."

I would note that a natural person recklessly spouting this inducement to self harm on social media would in many jurisdictions be subject to prosecution on some fairly serious charges.

Who is responsible here? The 6th century Justinian codification of Roman law (much of which concerns the state of slavery) held that a slave's master was responsible for the actions of his slave.

By reasonable analogy I would by identifying Gemini with a slave in the classical world, assign the responsibility to Gemini's owners.

Until we start directly applying criminal sanctions to the members of boards and to their C-suite we won't have much joy with criminal prosecutions of corporations. Directors insurance shouldn't save you from gaol time (or ten strokes of the lash.* ;)

_{* a chap can always dream.} (These tags used to work?)

Lenovo China clones the ThinkPad X1 Carbon with an old, slow, local x86

Cunning plan?

I imagine it cannot meet the Win11 minimum hardware requirement of a 9th(?) generation processor.

Actually precluding Windows isn't such a Balderick of an idea after all.

I imagine it might run a locally grown Linux distro reasonably well.

A bit of forward planning might mean that a decent risc-v might be later slotted into the design replacing the x86 CPU.

Google decides Europe's political ad rules are too hard to implement at scale

Google has decided ... it's better off not trying.

A win then! ;))

That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

"We ended up actually redesigning the LRTs to handle this type of use."

Clearly there were still a few dying embers of common sense in Lionel's day.

Today the manglement would install video cameras, hire a casual, or more likely, compel a salaried line manager to review the footage and sack any storeman that affixed his box opening bayonet to the LRT gun.

Your typical grizzled cantankerous storeman usual sports something a bit more robust than your $2 Daiso plastic handled box cutter (~Stanley knife [AU]) which is also insanely sharp so I imagine quite lethal.

If you were spending 40 hours a week opening cartons and for forty years you would have long ago stopped ffaffing around with blunt or fragile cutting tools both of which are like to cause injury. (I have only ever cut myself with, usually other people's, blunt knives.)

A common form was a piece of broken (hand) saw blade, roughly like a massively oversized #11 scalpel blade, mounted a wooden handle which In turn was wrapped in layers of gaffer tape (for grip.)

Saw blade steel takes and retains a decent edge, I am told.

Airbus A380 flew for 300 hours with metre-long tool left inside engine

Not Boeing

This really has nothing whatsoever to do with Boeing.

Assuming these engineers weren't, at some point in their careers, "trained" by Boeing.

I remember hullabaloo when Qantas first outsourced some maintenance on their then all Boeing fleet (to Bangkok I think) foreshadowing these sort of failures.

Enshittification is incredibly contagious and global both in scope and geographically but at an altitude of 10km this is not a comforting thought.

Re: "Qantas personnel in Sydney even requested removal of the report"

Yes, what a tool.

I was just thinking what was so amazing about flying with a 1.25m tool in it when aircraft normally fly with more than a few 2+ metre tools inside them.

Have to wonder whether septic mechanics would have located the tool if they were looking for a 50 inch one.

Re: Multi-Fail

"count everything at the end to make sure you've not left anything in the patient."

Kidneys - 2, livers - 1, spleens - 1, ...

Forgive me ... it's Friday. Bit of a bugger though if you left the gall bladder behind and it was supposed to be a cholecystectomy.

Tesla Cybertruck, a paragon of reliability, recalled again

Made me wonder at least...

what sort of electric motors Teslæ use? Prompted by the mention of an inverter (with dodgy power MOSFETs.)

I would have thought some type of brushless DC motor (with electronic commutation) which would I imagine would also require MOSFETs for switching (preferably the non dodgy sort.)

Turns out the Tesla motors are three phase (AC) induction motors hence the inverter.

Good old AC machine engineering. Regeneratively the motors presumably generate 3 phase AC which has to be rectified to charge the battery - presumably some switch mode affair.

And Linus Torvalds was spruiking how much simpler EVs were compared to ICEs. (He probably shouldn't give up his day job for auto mechanic or electrician. ;)

The go-faster pedal on a 1970s vehicle was pretty much a mechanical link to the carburettor and in the lower gears a few stabs of the pedal would normally result in a fairly decent imitation of a startled rabbit. The intelligent use of the accelerator can usually get you out of far more trouble than the instinctive application of the brake.

Congress ponders underwater alien civilizations, human hybrids, and other unexplained stuff

Re: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose (hit "Translate" if you don't understand)

"Stories of intercourse with Aliens/Satan/Demons/Gods/Animal spirits are as old as humanity. And that should be taken literally. All people in all of human history did have such stories and did believe in them one way or another."

"That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose." Genesis 6:2 KJV

Looks like the three branches of US federal government are now being scripted by Chris Carter and whoever wrote Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

In any case it's obvious that the phenomenon in the Navy's "go fast" video is nothing other than a rabid effing penguin on mission from Linus. (Probably the creator of bcachefs was about to receive a not so angelic visitation.)

TSMC's US operations threatened with employee discrimination class action

hard to get ahead ... unless you speak Mandarin

Cantonese won't cut it, then?

Curiously I believe there is some tension between Mandarin speakers and the other languages spoken on Taiwan.

The complaints don't seem to claim the alleged discrimination was purely language based rather more ethnically based - just the Vulture's clever sub head. ;)

Language competence is a reasonable employment criterion where it is either necessary, or desirable, for the effective performance of the role.

Certainly decades ago AU employers developing software for the Chinese (PRC) market often advertised for developers with written and spoken Mandarin competence.

I can understand a TW enterprise wishing to employ persons with a set of values and from a corporate culture reflecting their own. US companies operating in AU invariably import their senior executives or at lower levels of manglement employ, or promote, local drongos who vacuously espouse dismal US corporate culture and values.

Heaps of nations that would welcome TSMC setting up shop even if they wanted to import monkeys to run the shop. I imagine NZ wouldn't need to be asked twice (and unlike AU has a bit more fresh water than CA.US. ;)

Academic papers yanked after authors found to have used unlicensed software

Re: The study is behind a paywall

You'd be surprised what you get for if you ask. We get requests from Academia for our software, and if it's research focused will often give a free license for a year or so.

That is very true. One numerical algebra/optimisation library package with a fairly expensive commercial license is/was available gratis to academic institutions for noncommercial or teaching use with the requirement that credit was given in any publication. For the BOFH the only hassle was renewing the licence every 12 to 18 months.

Most software had fairly reasonable academic licenses in terms of cost and restrictions but notably computational fluid dynamics packages basically ranged from eye watering (academic) to being flayed (commercial.)

Another peculiarity was the more expensive and restrictive licenses used flexlm (lmgrd+vendor daemon) (mis)configured in ways that made circumvention under *ix fairly straightforward. Have to wonder about the quality of the software if their developers couldn't secure their license enforcement. ;)

In reality no one begrudges the vendor of decent software their license fee if only for the support and maintenance (updates, patches.) Unfortunately there is also a fair amount of expensive, crappy software out there (generally true.)

All bark, no bite? Musk's DOGE unlikely to have any real power

Re: Dodgy

DOGE — pronounced “dodgy”.

My thought too. The two of them never not working a "dodge" - the "dodgy brothers" (for Australians still standing in it.;)

Draining the swap... replaced with an enormous cesspit whose mephitic contents are now bubbling to the surface.

Air National Guardsman gets 15 years after splashing classified docs on Discord

Re: Surely that shouldn't be possible ?

You would have thought so given the Bell LaPadua model is so beloved of would be spooks in the ITSec game.

"A subject at a given security level may not read an object at a higher security level."

But then military intelligence always was a contradiction in terms, or more generously an oxymoron but this chap clearly a moron of the unadulterated variety.

I was thinking if the information were stored on a Multics system by default he would not have access to segments in more privileged rings. You have to wonder how they got some of this stuff right yonks ago yet today our systems are a security nightmare.

Will Windows Insiders find Recall lurking under the Christmas tree?

"Once 24/10/2025 rolls around my house won't have Windows anymore."

Turning your abode into a data centre then? Or just disposing of the glazing? ;)

From the date format probably not a septic, but by next October things may well be rather gloomy and draughty.

To kill memory safety bugs in C code, try the TrapC fork

Seeing a picture of Linus just under this article...

I imagine he is thinking "not another <finnish-expletive/> language demanding the keys to the kingdom."

Re: Code analysis

the demand for programmers greatly outstrips the supply of GOOD programmers.

I suspect the demand for good programmers is virtually non-existent - the demand for cheap programmers is insatiable which is why manglement are tossing themselves blind over autonomous AI programming systems.

Re: I've taken out union and some other things that I rarely use

Spoken like a true nsBDFL.

Had to look that up.

Most languages, at least among the algol descendants, have some sort of variant record type which C's union is the minimal version (no required tag.)

Anonymous unions are scattered amongst the socket header files to represent the variety of socket types but arguably this is to implement the socket ABI with some type safety but without function overloading.

Variant records are the data counterpart of the code case (switch) statement in the same way arrays (vectors) are to for statements. (Enumerated types and subrange types for the tags and array indices also feature.) Completely safe if the record's tag is used in the case selection and the correpondence between the tag and the variant is enforced by the compiler.

Another "safe C" compiler that surfaced yonks ago, Cyclone had similar aims but never seem to go anywhere.

I am curious to learn how TrapC handles error conditions like bounds errors - the name hints at some exception (~trap) system.

The example of zeroing an out-of-bounds pointer isn't exactly the best error indication mechanism.

Likewise not writing beyond the end of a buffer and blithely continuing on, could have quite serious ramifications were the truncated contents of the buffer to be used in a critical or sensitive context.

What is unexpectedly missing can be far more dangerous than that which is unexpectedly present. (Think the pin of a hand grenade. ;)

Australia tells tots: No TikTok till you're 16... or X, Instagram and Facebook

Re: Hmmmmm

You might well be on the money Nerf.

Also a propos the recent kerfuffle at Orange Hospital, where a non clinical administrator arbitrarily imposed his/her moral position in restricting certain services provided by that hospital. Prefiguring a replay of a similar disgraceful brawl from the US, I suspect.

Some flags Aussies won't salute no matter what galah runs it up the pole, fortunately.

"kids can play with the same OS that runs the world"

"Can. But do they do?"

Some do. I grant you, not many. But I have encountered late teens that have been using Ubuntu, programming (mostly python) and learnt LaTeX for document preparation from their early teens.

I suspect no matter what, those that "do" will find it well within their ability to circumvent any arbitrary restrictions, to do, whatever they would have done in any case, unimpeded.

No one but a complete fool would bother to interfere but then we are not exactly suffering a drought of fools at present. Are we?

Re: BOFH response

I pretty much agree with you.

But for the most impenetrable sequence of English words I have seen in a good while your:

"sit like mullets on their phones"

has to be contender.

Cellphones work under seawater then? Most states ban mobile phones in schools, I believe. :))

Silver Lining

which I think originally came from the same source as Cloud Cuckoo Land.

But the upside is that if the onus placed on the Social Media companies is so onerous as to be placed in the too hard basket then they may well determine that AU is too small a market to bother with and just walk away and blocking AU.

Of course the kiddywits are already aware of VPN services for other purposes and will continue accessing their social media whereas their elders and betters will have to find something more useful with which to fritter their lives away.

Re: You'd think...

mostly those sourced from outside Australia but plenty purchased in-country.

Yes based on the IMEI but even the Australian model of Nokia 2.3 fails the test. Oddly now it cannot make voice calls but data and SMS still work.

"organise a pissup in a brewery?" Don't think so.

"a dog fight?" No.

"their usual, except in a bordello?" You are kidding surely?

The NPU: Neural processing unit or needless pricey upsell?

Strikes me...

If you have a spare 15% of your silicon for this nonsense why not make that 15% 'soft' so that different and potentially more useful functionality could be dynamically assigned by replacing the microcode on demand.

A completely soft CPU might have some merit too. ;)

(A *really old* idea, though.)

No pilot? No problem! EHang's autonomous air taxis take off in Thailand

"poised for (short) commercial flights"

Seriously close to a euphemism for 'an expensive plummet.'

Thank you, but I might take the stairs. ;)

Cisco combines Meraki and Catalyst into single wireless brand

Re: And the Enshittification continues...

I was wondering what other English words contained itti* and consulting the interwebs - quite a lot and oddly veering to deprecatory - but one stood out in this context viz banditti (or prairie pirate.) If your putative small print is not too far from reality then banditti might be apt.

The icon for the Jolly Rogering implied by piratical practices. ;)

_{* always curious about the double 't' but I assume a single 't' would be pronounced shite+fication, or was by analogy with prettification.}

QNX 8 goes freeware – for non-commercial use

Comments Rather Mild...

compared to the tirades against and rants about the companies that own and have owned QNX I have appeared in other fora. ;)

Ignoring the intensity of these outbursts the sheer number would suggest to me that QNX and the whole kit and kaboodle is best avoided.

Back in the '90's I tried one of their floppies which I think I got from a Freeware company and was rather impressed but I was mucking about with Minix and Coherent and never followed it up. I do remember there was a local company making steel pipes using some type of electric welding process which was controlled by PC running QNX. But then in another city there was a textile design company using the Whitewater Group's Actor and Windows 2 to write their design applications. Two places I never got to work for but I imagine sooner rather than later both businesses were offshored to the PRC.

The sad tale of the Alpha massacre

I think...

if it were on a tru64 system QATOOLS=/usr/opt/qatools as I recall /opt was reserved for third party kernel packages.

Alway a startlingly good idea to script these things... even more startling if you don't as this then young wizard discovered .

Presumably his employer's database product was packaged using the native tools for each supported platform - setld kits in this case. I would have thought packaging the qatools software etc would have made sense as even setld -f -d ... couldn't come close to rm -rf /. I recall initially creating kits was tedious but definitely not rocket surgery.

Oddly enough I seem to recall Informix being one of the applications on the Associated Products CD.

Intel: Our finances are in the toilet, we're laying off 15K, but the free coffee is back!

Re: Is it decent?

if people never leave the offices to get their caffeine, they work more.

Probably wrong there too. Work more, but better or smarter? I suspect not.

When faced a difficult or complex situation which almost always needs two steps back and a bit of critical analysis, I have invariably found getting out the office and building into the fresh air for a bit of exercise and refreshment clears the cobwebs and often provides a fresh insight.

You don't have to rush off to Damascus for enlightenment, a stroll to a nearby café is often sufficient.

Re: Caffeine is the key here

Tea and coffee act very differently here.

Tea leaves actually contain more caffeine w/w than coffee beans.

Tea (black) leaves 22-28 mg of caffeine per 1 gram

Coffee beans: Arabica 10-12 mg of caffeine per 1 gram, Robusta 20-22 mg of caffeine per 1 gram.

The much smaller mass of tea typically used to prepare a beverage and the extraction (in)efficiency means much lower dose of caffeine than usually found in an equivalent coffee beverage.

Re: Caffeine is the key here

French with Spanish punctuation?

A link to a picture (or drawing) would be nice as I could be curious to see how pumpkin spice (which is?) is involved in coffee.

For me coffee is like beer is to a German, coffee beans*, roasted, ground plus hot water. (Traditional beer or ale making is not too dissimilar, I understand.)

_{* preferably not previously passed through the gastrointestinal tract of indochinese monkeys.}

The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

"The whole Rust versus C discussion has taken almost religious overtones"

The conflict that followed the Reformation was more rational than much of the nonsense flying about in the "discussion" referred to in the Title.

To be honest most theological disputes are more reasonably argued and certainly more respectfully.

BOFH: Don't threaten us with a good time – ensure it

Password Policy

The spouse once (late 90s, early 00s). worked in a financial institution where the policy required changing passwords (>8 chars, mixed case, digit+, special+) every few months but there wasn't a diktat about post-it notes. The staff in the department had long ago worked out that the system on recorded the last five passwords so each monitor had post-it node with a list of the six passwords they used cyclically. Was probably some DEC system with TCB.

At least recently the recommendations on password policy is a little saner.

Re: The Generation Game

"Do you have TCP?"

With or without the IP?

We tried TP4 but it didn't have anyone to talk to so it was lonely.

I am very wary of nongs doing surveys obviously sent on fishing expeditions especially by new brooms trying to make their mark by finding synergies and efficiency dividends. Enough hells in this game with fresh ones.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

"promised pint, because this was a simple fix"

FTP on windows to Unix box rang a bell there (or opened old wounds. ; )

TCP/IP QoS/ToS?

I vaguely recall having to add an undocumented line to a config file (netrc?) to change some odd* default QoS/ToS setting.

So I imagine that Usenet chap is up for two pints. ;)

_{* Solaris' System V TLI based networking could also be decidedly odd.}

Microsoft rolls out AI-enabled Notepad to Windows Insiders

Re: Advancing backwards

At least the Duke of Plazo-Toro could lead the retreat but U could trust the clowns running the Microsoft oily cart to do even that competently.

Nano or Pico

might be preferable. There is at least one statically linked version of gnu nano (built under msys.)

Vim or the graphical gvim works as expected under Windows.

Just the thought of editing an [ini] file with a hallucinating AI sabotaged editor ought to be the stuff of nightmares.

Robots crush career opportunities for low-skilled workers

Here's your empty coke bottle...

Get to work!

The robots can't wait while you go off to have a Jimmy Riddle.

When you start thinking who is left that can afford to purchase the mass output of automation you begin to think it's probably not consumers.

Sysadmin shock as Windows Server 2025 installs itself after update labeling error

Oh Magoo you've done it again!

Oh Magoo you've done it again!

Old, blind and stupid - that's my excuse.... what's Microsoft's?

Arecibo telescope might have failed because of weak sockets

"The NSF Arecibo Center for Culturally Relevant and Inclusive Science Education"

They [NSF] really have not read the room, have they?

Culturally Relevant and Inclusive is definitely not going to cut any mustard with the new regime.

The Centre for the Celebration of the Benefits of US Imperialism Investment* (to Puerto Ricans) might garner more support from the mainland.

They could more usefully fill the old dish with water for water sports. ;)

Welcome to the brave sad new world.

* the abolition of the Section 936 federal tax break which encouraged actual investment was on the Clinton administration's watch. Puerto Rico has its own contentious tax breaks which only encourage Americans to move there and push up real estate prices. Perhaps Arecibo could be redeveloped as luxury Condos?