Posts by Bebu sa Ware

Trump-shuttered climate change site back online in nonprofit hands

Re: this shameful administration is relegated to the ash-heap

I would pop for the star pickets and steel cable ties if others can supply the wood.

AI giants back non-profit to retrain workers left behind by AI

RAZE US

Homophonic wishful thinking, I suppose but not too far fetched if another couple of years of this AI induced insanity is on the cards.

They've read the scroll thing! AI helps decipher ancient document charred by Vesuvius

Re: Now then Mistress...

"modern-day people who have bookshelves prominently populated with weighty and serious tomes like A Brief History Of Time that they have no intention of reading"

Or Penrose's The Road to Reality which when read by the unprepared risks serious brain damage. ;)

Actually an unread collection of scientific and engineering works from that period would be fascinating.

Re: Now then Mistress...

"The Satyricon would show an interest in Modern Literature, as it dates from Late 1st Century, but Apuleius would be headline news as he wasn't born until about 124 AD!"

Good point. :)

"an interest in Modern Literature" — rather droll. Such a foresighted library owner might have arranged to have been elsewhere on the fateful day.

Curious whether anything much in that line of Latin literature survives from before AD79. Some of the more frisky frescos (murals) in Pompei suggest there would have been a market for it.

Re: Now then Mistress...

> Uxor Caesaris supra suspicionem est.

Curdle milk then ?

Re: Now then Mistress...

The lost scrolls of Lurkio a slave from up Pompei way as interpreted by the scholar Frankie Howerd ?

Looking at the scrolls already recovered it looks as if it was the library of some boring old git who went in for the philosophy lark exclusively with nothing more racey than De natura rerum.

Probably too much to expect even a copy of the Satyricon or The Golden Ass but perhaps the horny old goat had a private collection of Iuvenis Voluptarii — no staples in scrolls. ;)

Perseverance rover finds even more signs of extinct life on Mars

Re: Jesus on Mars

> The Christian Nationalists won’t like this.

"Christ on a bike / Mary on the handlebars / Garner Ted on the mike / All doing the Tour de Mars"

I cannot imagine there is much of anything on the saner side of doolally that they would like.

I don't know how mainstream theology approaches a separate non·terrestrial evolution of life but I imagine it is fairly relaxed.

Anything even vaguely fundamentalist is going to feel threatened… existentially so in many cases.

Christianity was and is, at heart, a religion celebrating life whereas these mostly American "cults" only celebrate death and suffering but have the unmitigated gall to call themselves christians. (Jesus wept.)

_{Disclaimer: I would be an atheist if I could be sufficiently arsed to actively not believe in a supreme being. Apathetic agnostic ?}

Perseverance rover finds even more signs of extinct life…

on Earth. If it managed to return in 50 years time.

FOSS dev builds a BASIC compiler using LLVM

Coherent did it all on the 286, and AFAICS that version is lost to history.

Back then I had Coherent (3?) running on an AT - actually quite a nice 7ed Unix clone with a door stopper manual/guide.

I think all of a process' segments were accessible from every other process^† — although I might be thinking of Minix 1.5.

64kB segments were far too small for any significant numerical/scientific work where a smallish array of 10,000 reals might require 80kB and faffing about with two segments. Segments needed to be as big as required (and of course almost by definition dynamic.)

I always laboured under the impression that most 386 operating systems used a flat address space, eschewing segmentation because segment based operations were very inefficient (slow) and page level protection good enough for Unix-like systems.

C itself doesn't have an intrinsic problem with segments - the C89 standard was fairly coy about what could expect from mucking about with pointers referencing different data structures (objects) even of the same type.

The real mode 8088/8086 faux segmentation was a massive PITA which probably put a whole generation of C programmers off segmentation.

_{† a shared LDT? I remember playing with far (intersegment) calls into other process' text segment (which had thunks with far returns that wrapped local near functions.) A bit like Solaris doors I imagine.}

Re: The caption on the photo...

"Useful for the visually impaired who use a text-to-audio screen reader. It's becoming more common that it used to be."

I am increasingly unable to see that. :(

BOFH: Amnesty means never having to say you're sorry

The Colour of Magic…

Reminded me of Twoflower's selling fire Inn·sewer·ants in Ankh·Morpork which led to significant, if unplanned, urban renewal.

Most places where I had worked had an annual e-waste collection when a contractor parked several waste skips in the parking lot - or even a large shipping container. Everyone was encourage to bring out their old (often unused) hardware like the Whitechapel workstations that had lurked under and a desk and no one ever used or non·switched 110VAC hardware that had been cooked on its first outing in 240VAC land.

Security boss thought MFA would be too much security

Re: CYA

I always thought that CYA was for See Ya (See you, au revoir etc) — I must have got off the bus one planet short of Earth.^†

Curious that "cover your ass" is preferable to "cover your arse" in ning-nong land when the first would presumably have the sense of a stallion "covering" a mare.

CYB could just as easily be cover your bum — advisably so considering the crap that lurks behind the U-tube of Youtube.

MFA/2FA is probably an ongoing conflict but the fight against the evil of shared accounts continues down to this day. Mostly sheer laziness, the residue just appalling ignorance.

_{† by the time I realised what ICQ stood for, it was no more.}

Micron locks in historically high memory prices for five years

"all users access to CoPilot to have it write their emails in iambic pentameter."

Just the meter to compose the tragedies of our times. ;)

Myself, I would plumb for terza rima for a little renaissance elegance and flare… and just for the hell of it. ;)

"verso la fine del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per nella terra oscura / ché la diritta via era smarrita."

Very oscura and very smarrita, I should think.

Re: could be good

> Why would China want to help the "rotten west"? It's a perfect opportunity to squeeze the "enemy of the communist revolution".

I would have thought the last four decades might suggest the PRC had screwed "the rotten west" by selling to us all the tat whose manufacturing we offloaded to them.

To be fair a self inflicted wound as much inflicted by our rich and poweful on our poor and stupid, as anything else.

Anyway we will impose a 1000% tariff on PRC RAM — that'll teach'em. /s

I would guess that the PRC will achieve tech parity with the west (by hook and by crook) in a decade — sooner if the AI bubbleburst's financial blast radius includes most of the world as it well might.

A few minutes thought of what a world with PRC parity with the west would look like makes the current geopolitical shenanigans appear even more ridiculous (and tragic.)

Collabora releases CODE 26.04 as rivalry between FOSS cloudy office suites heats up

the hucksters will pivot to trying to sell us all quantum computing instead

A quantum office suite where documents can be simultaneously in multiple states could be a civil servant's wet dream.

"Yes, minister… and no."

"You always say that Humphrey. Can I ever get a straight 'yes' or 'no' from you ?"

"Yes minister… and no."

Loop engineering, latest AI buzzword, still needs humans in the loop

[Fruit] loop† engineering

Loopy^‡ at least.

Another word for a loop might be a noose.

_{‡ Loopy sense 2. and † Fruit loop}

Windows 11 turns five, leaving some important lessons for Microsoft

"Windows 12 should be a beacon of light."

The brilliant flash as the whole circus starts to disappear over the event horizon of the black hole of AI.

Boffin claims Microsoft's supposed quantum leap does not compute due to 'basic Python errors'

"We stand by our results and our roadmap."

deeply rooted in (or by) our AI hallucinations as reality crashes by.

I imagine "stand by" has the same sense as saying "I stand by this train wreck awaiting the ambulances."

Microsoft, AI and Quantum Mechanics — the forces of cock·up never enjoyed so many degrees of freedom.

UK government wants 'trusted' news sources promoted above the social media noise

people look for alternatives when the "trusted" ones are so skewed.

Not a Brit but I was also thinking "Trusted" … I would be putting Al Jazeera and even The Grauniad ahead of the BBC.

I don't know about Sky in the UK but Sky News in AU is an absolute joy and wonder to behold (I suspect it could give Fox a run for its money.)

With the state of current affairs reporting one might be better served trusting the book of Revelations (KJV naturally.)

British Home Office seeks techie to herd nearly 1,000 engineers looking after 600 systems

UK.GOV IT all a bit Walmington·on·Sea

Dad's Army but with wall·to·wall Pikeys with a splash private Walker spiv.

_{A few years ago I stumbled over the episode of Goodnight Sweatheart which reprised the Dad's Army characters from the Bank. Very droll.}

AI coding agents could soon cost more than the developers using them

Could be straight out of HHGTTG

"where it [AI/LLM] just makes up processes and committees with people who know from nothing and are suddenly asked for permission for things they never heard of "

If not Douglas Adams certainly verging on the Kafkaesque.

the concept of "tokenmaxxing"

You don't have to be a geneticist to suspect that anything with two Xs in it is very likely to be fucked.

Tokenmaxxing would be Altman equivalent of looksmaxxing which might entail smacking oneself in the face with a hammer — the monthly bill for token use being a financial mallet walloping to the corporate mug.

Ordering a trip back to 2009, with a side of nostalgia

Re: God's waiting room

Were Worthing's waiting population expedited on their way by the superior public health policies of Boris & co.?

The idea of retiring to an English seaside resort would definitely not be my idea of heaven — more like being permanently trapped inside on a rainy Sunday afternoon in East Cheam with Tony Hancock — a Hell for which Dante couldn't provide a circle.

O2 joins UK 2G switch-off with summer 2029 start date

"a faster and more reliable service for customers."

Aspirational at best.

Telco sector and in the UK… delusional.

Bold move, Cotton: Trump administration tells US techies it expects American quantum computer by 2028

qualified to be a fully trained Hermitian.

I don't think the MAGAoids would be too keen on self-adjoint operators (too woke.)

Real eigenvalues ? — nothing real in the Dilbert (sic) space of Trumpisstani physics.

Re: Just before elections in 2028

"I want to be President for Life.— Again, none of these are going to happen, either."

I don't know given how seedy he's been looking lately, that one might fly.

I guess most of the world's leaders would attend the state funeral if only to piss in his coffin.

India and China are home to 2.9 billion people – and together they bought just 13 million PCs in Q1

Re: In other news… sales of fridges to Eskimos continue to disappoint markets

Have you looked at the condition of the permafrost recently ?

It's actually a bugger for the Inuit and Eskimo who would traditionally store food in the permafrost (viz a hole in the ground.)

Once the permafrost starts melting I think we can queue Walmington·on·sea's Private Frazer.

Re: How much

> 1 unit per 221,000,000 people? I have my doubts

13.1 million PCs per 2,900 million pop. per Q or annualised ~ 52 million per 2,900 million assuming constant sales.

13 PCs per 2,900 in Q1 or 52 PCs per 2,900 this year.

1 PC per 221 people in Q1 or 1 PC per 55 in the year.

1 PC per 55 per year seems reasonable with an mean replacement time of 5 years. I would then guess around 20% of households would have a laptop or PC with the rest depending on a tablet or smartphone.

I am actually surprised just how fast the technology became available to so many people who only a few decades ago would have been fortunate to have even the most basic comms.

In amongst all the shit we endure today it is very easy to lose sight of the potential for the technology to improve lives even if the choices people make are frequently falling short of the that potential. Another Apple Tree I suppose. ;)

Microsoft Access finally breaks free of its 22-inch form limit

I didn't know that Access was still kicking

fortunately I have never had to deal with it but I have never heard a good word uttered for it — mostly curses with the afflicted fleeing to FileMaker which from my limited exposure seem to require very peculiar, if not sordid, tastes.

Enterprise's "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" credo is gazumped by MicroSlop's "if it's ours it's always broken… let's break it some more."

Blast from the past as GIMP 0.54 is revived in Flatpak form

Re: Wow I feel old

Just like yesterday. ;)

I realised that I had spent the first 50% of my working life dealing with the various Unixes on mostly proprietary hardware and the second 50% dealing with a few Linux distros on x86/amd64 hardware with an unbelievably short overlap — second only to the replacement of SCSI 3 with SAS at about the same time.

I managed to keep my hair and even the grey retreated after retiring so Unix/Linux might be beneficial to your health and longevity. Windows and other MicroSlop would have put me a box years ago; or in a cell for having put another sod in a box.

"gtk and gdk, for the Gimp Tool Kit, and the Gimp Drawing Kit"

Always wondered about Gtk and Gdk but couldn't be arsed to find out.

Motif never seemed to die. Surprising amount of scientific software was written using it — presumably originally on Unix workstations (Sun, SGI, DEC etc). Once done — the cleverty was in the numerical and modelling code — no one wanted to muck with it and the GUI needs were usually pretty basic as were the programmers' X11 skills.

So I spent a fair bit of time messing with Lesstif and Motif source code and libraries under Linux in the earlier noughties porting this type of code.

The stuff that used Tk+Tcl for the graphical front end and one or more binaries to do the real work were much easier to get going. Likewise code that just piped output into gnuplot for graphing normally just worked.

Always more fulfilling to work with people who consistently prefer "correct" over "pretty." (Even to the point of the fug·ugly.)

Five Eyes spooks warn AI means infosec incidents can become ‘major operational and financial crises’

CyberSEC not the new shiny any longer…

All the magical IT security pixies you employed a few years ago have all flown off to flutter around the novel flames of AI.

Real security (in IT especially) is hard, really hard. The security properties of a system necessarily pervades the whole system (holistic in buzzword bingo) which means to ensure secure operation there must be understanding of the system both in detail and depth. Security teams with this knowledge and experience mostly just don't exist.

My money is on "major operational and financial crises" for the win.

Digital indigestion: Fizzy Coca-Cola display chokes on full storage

sachet of Pop Rocks/Space Dust

Or a sachet or two of sherbert powder with a cola drink chaser.

The sherbert powder use to also come in a small paper bag with a hollow liquorice stick inserted as a straw — you only ever accidentally inhaled the powder once. Not nice. All long gone now.

The memory crisis is getting so bad that even retro RAM prices are going to the Moon

And here I was thinking their asking …

AUD15.00 per piece 8GB ECC DDR3L RDIMM that "they were dreaming."^†

Perhaps not.

I have an old dual xeon box that could do with this stuff but has to be 16Gb parts (x4) (I got some a few years ago for less than AUD100.00 for 64Gb.)

_{† AU cultural reference (The Castle)}

Inspired by musical greeting cards, DARPA demands tiny, cheap, self-modifying systems

So we are doing FORTH now ?

Given the state of the US generally (85% doolally) perhaps should just issue greeting cards to their GIs that play Colonel Bogey ("Bullshit, Bullshit,… was all the band could play.") or "Dixie" or similar inspirational tunes.

XLISP or Scheme might also serve but FORTH was created to control large telescopes and run on hardware that wouldn't power a cheap toaster or light bulb today.

The database that refused to die: How Postgres survived its own creators

Interesting

I didn't know the connection between Postgres today and the Ingres work described in The Ingres Papers. Basically having the code BSD licensed was probably responsible for its renaissance.

I remember at the time ADTs were a big thing in teaching compsci students software design and programming before OO became de rigeur. Still a pretty useful component of their education if only for clearly delineating between a representation and the thing represented.

As another UK prime minister bites the dust, a contradictory tech legacy remains

…that people wet their pants demanding a return to the 19th century?

"Wihat is it about today's political discourse that people wet their pants demanding a return to the 19th century?"

Possibly the 20th century and U²³⁵ & Pu²³⁹.

Humanity trashed Earth orbit – next stop the Moon

dumping grounds where material can be deposited, collected, and recycled

Given the Moon doesn't possess a significant atmosphere the dumped material is likely going to smack into the surface at a fair pace which pretty much brings you back to mining and refining once you dig it out and separate the regolith from the molten mass.

Might make more sense to have a structure orbiting the Moon whither discarded material could be slowly shuttled by a fleet solar powered ion-drive craft and tacked on to the mass like the old fashioned ball of salvaged string. We were once a thrifty lot — hard to imagine in these profligate times.

An interplanetary rag·and·bone firm ? Steptoe^†& Son's Celestial Salvage & Scrap (by appointment to Karen Caeli, Imperator Martis.)

_{† Sanderson I think for the sinistral side of the pond.}

Health board apologizes for phishing staff with with bogus vacation day

Re: to stop you thinking logically

Fatigue, overwork and stress typically in a healthcare environment aren't universally recognised as condusive to consistent logical thinking. /s

The IT team responsible really needs the percussive application of the cluestick, preferably nail studded, to the back of the head but as long time commentards would guess from my opinion of IT security that I would also believe that remedy ought to be applied prophylactically.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Health Services were to find that their staff attrition rate significantly increases in the next few months as those staff think "sod this for a game of soldiers" and seriously think of taking position in Australia where at least the climate is better (and you have a wide choice.)

Lessons from the VMwars – nothing virtual about the Broadcom vs Tesco slugfest

The very best time to be aware of history is…

arguably before you also become history.

Never get involved in a land war in Asia. — The Middle East also not looking too attractive for those shenanigans

That which cannot learn and adapt inevitably must perishes.

Small island nation tries bold tech education strategy

Sobering…

to think that Discworld and most of the leading characters in it are a damn sight more rational, intelligent and principled than our lot.

We seemed to have enrolled a legion of trolls to run our world and for good measure turned up the heat.

Esme Weatherwax… Mistress Weatherwax or Granny to you, I would imagine. I think only Nanny Ogg commonly addressed her as Esme^†, but she was a force of nature herself.

Sir Terry's witches are perhaps my favourite of his Discworld characters.

_{† and I suppose Mustrum Ridcully.}

Anthropic's Mythos mess just keeps getting more complicated

Picture worth a thousand words.

The senile grumpy git pictured in the article's graphic clearly not a happy camper.

It looks as though he has just been told the Australian are refusing to ship Tim Tams to the US because of his punitive tariffs on the penguins^† of Heard and McDonald Islands and that he will have to settle for Oreos for his tiffin. How tragedy.

_{† the seals aren't doing too well either.}

"not acquiescing to its [the Trump Administration's] every move"

which to be fair would be akin to Brownian motion conga line.

The only discernible pattern in the chaos is the grift.

How dare you stop data loss – that's not your job!

I am guessing…

that this was just the stuff that made Britain great. A leading light in the EU with vibrant, innovative, advanced economy… hang on I'm probably thinking of Latvia.

Lord Jobsworth would have entirely approved.

MBGA or MUKGA probably too silly even for Reform.

Why Amazon hates 'human-in-the-loop' AI governance

Fairly good exemplar of why you would not let engineers loose…

on anything actually important or anything requiring making ethical decisions, or indeed plain common sense.

The discipline is typically narrow and specialised even tunnel visioned. Getting undergraduates to select a wider range of their mandatory humanities subjects largely an exercise in futility (Formal logic 1 hardly broadening to a student who covered logic design in an engineering subject.)

How the blighters manage to reproduce was always a mystery — suppose one has to thank the "managing women" that took them in hand. :)

(Female engineers are more common now but even back then the few were basically normal and human.)

I would say engineers are useful, fine fellows in their way but best kept on very short tethers and outside their specialist technical fields their judgment can, and ought to, be discarded.

Re: VP Eric Brandwine explains people aren't all that great, actually

> but they reproduce and learn common sense

I suspect neither causal nor concurrent. ;)

Waymo hits the brakes after robotaxis keep missing the signs for freeway construction zones

Re: Dumb cops

We called them “dumb cops” — they were still in evidence in some suburbs (Lower Northshore) until the late '90s. If you hit one even with a fairly high wheelbase ute, you knew about it. Not that NSW is entirely free of the curse of "dumb cops" as recent events reminds us.

Bcachefs exits experimental status in new 'performance release'

"his AI coding assistant PoC was conscious – and female."

I guess he won't be joining Hans Reiser if he disposes of his female coding assistant. (As good a name for your delusional totty as any, I suppose.)

Possibly discriminatory but I prefer my file systems' creators to have a tighter grip on reality. Small minded, I know…

Microsoft's latest Windows bug belongs in the Recycle Bin

"Microsoft is working to improve the reliability of its software."

The reliability of its unreliability is now reached 99.9999%.

It is hard to imagine why anyone would be ffaffing around this particular code — one would have thought that it would have been mostly done·and·dusted decades ago. "Si non confectus, non reficiat."

Devs in the trenches are stressed from the mandate to automate everything, but Render thinks it can help

"How're we going to do this? I don't fucking know."

For a CTO I imagine this is a full·blown existential crisis. — "…That’s it, ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me?"

"…That's what I have to figure out." — I shouldn't bother overmuch if it were predicated on an "AI-native web" which sounds more a snare of Ungoliant or Shelob than anything else.