Posts by Bebu sa Ware 2773 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Nov 2024
>Unless your users are somewhat hostile!
As Carlo Cipolla contended in his Le leggi fondamentali della stupidità umana don't underestimate the irresistable power of sheer stupidity.agaist which the gods themselves contend in vain.†
† Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens. — Schiller
I have an old ppc Mac with 2008 so I wonder whether it would still work ? ;) Actually I recall NeoOffice was a better package.
If it's just certificate expiry then fiddling the system time would circumvent that. Using an interposed dynamic library with the office binaries could give the license check an earlier time.
FreeBSD can run Linux binaries after loading a few kmods - FreeBSD even provided a package to install RHEL7.
Darwin is in part descended from FreeBSD which makes me wonder whether the same kmods might be ported to Darwin.
I found installing RHEL8 under UTM worked pretty well for me.
I had to ask the Chinese lappy owner to sit beside me while trying to configure her PC for the local network etc and ask her "what does this say?" and this and so on. Her English was fine for her work and everyday use but many of the computer terms lost (or gained) a great deal in translation.
The installed PRC version of Windows (XP or W2K I think) seemed to have quite a different layout of configuration options and menus and only supported the Chinese language.
I think in the end we discovered these homegrown laptops didn't support ethernet and the RJ45 socket was for some peculiar serial technology they used on her home institution's network. A spare Xircom RealPort card solved that problem and DHCP the rest.
Rather Pythonesque in hindsight but quite frustrating at the time.
> I expect a few bar brawls from less stupid people ridiculing the chump phone.
Just be subtle. Don't ridicule the Trumpiness of the phone. Instead imply that you as a real man wouldn't feel comfortable with all that flashy gold - more redolent French tart than Sean Connery… but fine for her indoors or if you are that sort of chap.
Have to remember these prats suffer from planet sized insecurity with equally massive overcompensation.
Inspired by the "Corner Gas" episode with rivalry for the ever smaller cellphones until one of the women suggested the latest tiny phone was perhaps a little effete.
WikiP claimed a student enrolment 34,840 in 2024/25. The BBC stated Nottingham U had 7363 FTE staff in 2026.
The proliferation of role based email accounts allocated to staff and mailing lists over 20 years might give you 454000 but still pushing it.
The student enrolments need to be amortised over the average length of a degree (3-4 years ?) and staff numbers in the staff turnover which given the high level of casualisation in the sector could mean both that and FTE conceal a very large number of short and part time employees.
Unaccountably I always imagined Nottingham was the institution in the BBC TV series "A Very Peculiar Practice."
Oddly that can be read in two entirely different ways.
The intended meaning — "They [the bug hunters] are angry at Redmond [Microsoft] and [the bug hunters] will have their revenge."
Alternatively — "They [Microsoft] are angry at Redmond and will have their revenge." [Presumably on the bug hunters.]
Probably both meanings simultaneously. How quantum. ;)
I would have had "angry with" but "angry at" is likely the preferred form in the LP creole.
> 1 Mandelson = 1 Starmer + 1 Palantir?
You mean a Mandelson is to a Palantir and Starmer like a guinea (= £1/1/- or 21s) was to £ and shilling ?
Not clear which would be the larger unit of synchophancy of the Palantir and Starmer and the rate of conversion between the two.
Slow learner.
Only plus side is imagining his spending hours deleting an email from 2000 inboxes.
Speaking of which deleting email without trace from inboxes is another peeve of mine. Means there is zero evidential value in the contents of any mail box.If the contents should or must be deleted then replacing the contents with a tombstone noting that the item had been deleted with a reference and the message digest of the original contents and signed by the key of the responsible party.
You see quite a bit of this corporate email skulduggery if you fetch your email every few minutes to a local mail spool. ;)
whether the hurry to get this done by 2027 is a giant snow job to convince Trump and fellow loons that a Moon landing before the end of 2028 is plausible in order to keep funding flowing for the US manned space program. Given Trump and his administration, a giant blow job might be just as effective.
The great risk from the MAGA perspective is that the PRC might be sufficiently stimulated to get in first — the taikonauts waving to orbiting Artemis III on the Chinese craft's descent to the surface. How embarrassment.
who is acquiring replacement body parts to replace his own gangrenous organs to extend his own miserable existence.
Planet Zanak's Queen Xanxia† went one better, consuming whole planets… but hang on… if the various delusions, including AI, of our tech billionaires are interpreted as feeble grasps for physical immortality then they are well on the way of consuming one planet with Space Karen wanking on about Mars (although he seems to have gone quiet on that front.)
† The Pirate Planet BBC 1978 [Douglas Adams] although I always thought the nurse was rather cute.
While 79g is less than the smallest smart phones today, I would have thought a really light, thin foldable mouse might hit the spot better — a leaf out of Apple's book so to speak.
The Logitech offering seems to be just a little too thick and heavy to fit comfortably in the shirt pocket but then I suppose people who cart around phones with screens getting on to 7" (170mm) wouldn't blink at another 80g.
Doubtless good advice in a great many contexts.
Although nowadays I wonder how many could use a hammer… when I see an adult male hold a hammer near its head attempting to knock a nail into a surface I don't think humanity has much of a future… all the way from a rhinoceros tooth to a gormless prat bending a nail on gypboard (drywall.)
The only glimmer of hope is the increasing number of young women that take themselves off to adult ed. etc to learn how to use tools correctly (and with safety gear) to complete repairs or renovations. Hopefully tales of paint tins opened with wood chisels will become incredible.
"How many patches were generated using AI to assist in coding or testing? What quality issues may exist in these patches? "
Too many. Too many.
With risk of going all Zen:
I have used Evolution (on Linux) for Enterprise Exchange mail and it does work reasonably well - not that I liked it much… I preferred Pine :)
I think when Ximian brought out Evolution there was an Exchange-like groupware server (Insight ?) that it could work with as well as some connector to talk to Exchange. (Early 2000s I think.)
Exchange always seemed to me to be a slow motion train smash (clearly best avoided) and M365 doesn't seem to be a great improvement but having spent the last few decades avoiding both I am not exactly unprejudiced.
The authors state they controlled for confounding factors (MRDA) but you would not necessarily want a paper titled "iPhone usage has neglible impact on birth rate. Steve Jobs off the hook."
Hardly going to be the darling of the US talk show circuit.
I don't think you can entirely control for the demographic differences between the AT&T serviced region (with iPhones) and the adjacent non·AT&T serviced region. eg AT&T might target higher income and education regions — two well known correlators with lower birth rates,
You think ?
I am puzzled that Meta, Google, Apple etc when virtual reality was their newest fad didn't explore more fully this aspect of telepresence and remote wanking working — the return to the office mandates ? Obviously would not have made any difference to the conception or the rate.
"70 percent of developers believe AI-generated code has more vulnerabilities, and 30 percent knowingly ship vulnerable code into production."
The 30% of developers that don't believe AI-generated code has more vulnerabilities would unknowingly ship vulnerable code into production. Blithe spirits they.
This misfeasance added to existing malfeasance would mean 60% of developers are shipping into production, AI-generated code riddled with vulnerabilities.
The hazards presented by the presence in production of this code are pretty much taken independently and the risks considered on that basis. I suspect with AI generated hazards a high degree of synergism is likely and the risks are additive (rather than multiplicative.)
To err is human, it takes a computer to really foul up, but only AI can fuck up anything beyond all recognition.
> the first country in the world to make it impossible for <anygroup> to take, share or view <whatever> images
I suppose in achieving the patently impossible the UK would be first.
If it were phrased "reduce the risk" of the hazard of children taking etc then you might have a game but even then you might soon conclude: sod this for a game of soldiers.
As a commentard wrote earlier today "choosing to fight unwinnable battle[’]s - with the obvious half-baked knee jerk reactionism.." which would accurately describe the UK government on this and most other issues. Starmer san would appear to be even more devoid of ideas than of ideals. The bloke really is thick.
> Do you really want president Vance?
The Titanic could accommodate the whole administration, tech billionaires and other hangers on, legislature and judiciary with room left over — really spacious if we removed the lifeboats (recommended) before embarcation.
Offer the whole boiling a gold plated, exclusive, once in a lifetime, luxury iceberg viewing cruise.
submit your handwritten application by post to the address provided when you solve the cryptic crossword below.
Applications ought to address the position description but will be graded on neatness, clarity and concision.
Should filter out 99% of the population and 100% of the AI hopeful. I reckon anyone that can ace a cryptic, write a few decent coherent paragraphs could make fist of rocket surgery. NB Boris 'Bloody Useless' Johnson should not apply.
Dodged that bullet I guess. ;)
Pre·RHEL Red Hat was also being used in scientific/research contexts.
I had a 20 node Pentium 4 Beowulf cluster built using RH7.2 which very soon ticked a few unfortunate boxes.
64 bit hardware (and the large virtual address spaces) were needed for most applications which, until the Opterons arrived and were affordable, meant 64 bit Unix boxes were still desirable.
DEC had a version of RH7.2 that ran on some of their Alpha workstations which worked but I found slower the Digital Unix 4 (OSF/1.)
I imagine once IBM decides that RHEL is just a platform to run their proprietary software and services they might decide it is cheaper to outsource the development and maintenance of the boring FOSS components to the RHELatives.
I definitely wouldn't say there is nothing cheap about IBM but rather in common with most US enterprises, there is everything cheap about IBM.
> bubble will be blown up a little bit more after the sell off.
Dead bear's bounce ?
Curious how these stocks are also sensitive to the Feds rate remaining higher. I would have imagined that most of the traded stock volume was from non-leveraged investment which wouldn't be that sensitive. With all the circular investment in the AI Ponzi, some of the players might be sensitive to funding costs which could be now causing disquiet in the broader market. Clearly a lot more in play.
As I think Warren Buffett once said to the effect "if you don't understand the business, don't invest in it."
This whole circus reeks far more of Bernie Madoff than of Warren Buffett, but with a definite aroma of Elizabeth Holmes and topped off with the mad hair of Sam Bankman-Fried.
When you think about it users don't actually exist inside a computer. What masquerades as a user are processes labelled by some identifier (uid) linked to the user.
So the idea that processes belonging to an agent might be so labelled as such too, is not exactly Einsteinian insight. Not really differing much from background or demon processes."
A process' capabilities and how it acquires or inherits them might differ between users and agents.
I imagine if you were running agents under Linux you might keep them on a pretty short leash with SELinux (enforcing.).
"[Microsoft] has rediscovered what an operating system actually is and actually does." — You think ?
Have to be grateful the clowns didn't wedge CrapPilot into the Windows' kernel, I suppose.
along with other sorry tales, these IT shambles are just accurately replicating the actual shambles lf the systems that the IT seeks to model.
I would keep my own local copy of the records too — just in not excel.
Does anyone else have the sense of the UK government is one of repeatedly asking the same question with the irrational expectation of receiving a different, more acceptable answer without actually changing anything in the iterim ?
Goose feather quill, oak galls ink on vellum — that's the way to do it.™ (Mr Punch)
Clearly a chemistry teacher and not an old school English or Latin teacher (muttering something about gerunds and genitives.)
Personally I incline to allowing the use of whatever resources you desire (open book+) to answer the exam questions in handwriting but you will have to face a viva later to explain your answers. On your explanations you will be graded. Kills the two birds of cheating and of rote regurgitation with one stone.
Sharpen the edge of critical thinking too, I daresay.
You can be certain Trump branded coal will be chockers with Sulphur and other lovelies.
Almost as though these drongos want to return to Victorian social conditions and environmental degradation. I can imagine what they would do with Joseph Bazalgette (fake woke science.)
> Supposedly green Australia exported more coal than anybody last year, most of which they sold to China.
Apparently a record for thermal coal in Sept quarter 2025. Metallurgical coal expected to rise steadily until 2030.
Of course the floridan shitgibbon will blame AU for being able to scoop this stuff out of humongous holes in the ground, ship it the coast, put in on a ship for a fraction of the cost the US producers can… and we will deserve the punitive tariffs he will impose on… Austria (if we are lucky, otherwise the poor bloody penguins again cop it.)
I think most Australian accept that thermal coal mining is being sunset and that metallurgical coal cannot be too far behind. Nice little earner while it lasted.
