Posts by John H Woods

Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved

Stop operating?

What does this mean? They won't have offices here? You'll need a SIM that isn't +44 to initiate the service? Or use of Signal will become illegal?

Because none of these things will "shut Signal Down"

Save $7 million on cloud by spending $600k on servers, says 37Signals' David Heinemeier Hansson

Seems quite simple to me...

Cloud works if your compute demands (including staffing) are bursty. That usually includes SMEs, and a few LEs (eg. Retail at December rush, ticket companies for big events &c.) but, with the exception of signifant new programmes, I think the size of most LEs smoothes those demands sufficiently for cloud to lose its competitive edge.

In addition, I feel that a lot of hosting complexity is down to aircon. I wonder if the real "[from] cloud repatriation" will kick off with liquid cooled commodity servers.

Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page

To me the worrying thing is ...

... exactly how much each company wants you to use their own browser.

Tech job vacancies hamper England's digital health plans

I think you'll find ...

Liz T already cracked open that box. There might be something left if you're lucky.

Yukon UFO could have cost unfortunate balloon fan $12

OtOH

Free training

Microsoft to cap daily Bing AI queries to stop the bot delivering daft responses

Re: Typical Microsoft

There is no mechanism for it to summarize. It's an antisummary machine, generating text from a few (more on less) facts

Amazon mandates return to office for 300,000 corporate staff

Re: Cat ... bag ...

Almost but not quite. There are more than two parties, and In a FPtP shamocracy, you can only sensibly vote against the party you don't like, not for the one that you do.

What you need to know about the real-time capable edition of Ubuntu 22.04

Re: The key question maybe?

It's the guarantee that's key, not the limit.

The fast system you developed is not "real time" because it's not deterministic (hmm, is any Garbage Collecting system deterministic?)

We don't need "OS-independent standards" because Operating Systems are either Real Time or not, and no matter how fast things go in the latter case it never qualifies as the former.

Euro bit barn biz has hot prospect: immersion cooling for colo customers

"Submerged cooling is a real game changer"

I agree. I can see the result of this being a far lower reliance on big cloud providers for Large Enterprises. Unlike SME's they already have the multinational footprint; multiple premises (in which, with compact liquid cooling, any small room could be a mini datacentre); the staff (or at least the purchasing power); and, most importantly, the sheer scale that smooths their compute, network and storage demand. I predict that a pattern will develop of spinning up VMs, containers &c. in AWS, Azure et al. for dev and test but migrating established production functionality back to "edge" to avoid big cloud bills.

Sure, Big Cloud can do it cheaper, as they have economies of scale. But given that's a matter of diminishing returns, the question is, by the time they have charged you their margin, are you actually saving any money? I suspect that, for a lot of LEs, that answer is, if not firmly in the negative, at least not well proven, even before you price in the risk of loss of control of your technology.

This app could block text-to-image AI models from ripping off artists

Re: Derived versions

Exactly, and it's never that clear cut... Look what happened regarding Bittersweet Symphony.

Unplug that Anker battery pack now: House blaze sparks recall

Re: Butane is lighter than air

No. Butane is, of course, heavier than Propane. As one might expect, C4H10 is about a third heavier than C3H8.

If you have a fan, and want this company to stay in business, bring it to IT now

Re: air CON

You are correct of course, but nearly in all circumstances where people feel "they can't get enough air" they are actually reacting to increased CO2. 3% is seriously uncomfortable and 5% has a good chance of killing you even if the other 95% is oxygen.

In contrast, someone in a tank of inert gas will probably keel over and die before they even notice there's not enough O2.

Tesla's self-driving code may ignore stop signs, act unsafe. Patch coming ... soon

Re: Recall is right..

Context is everything or, if not, at least substantially more important than dictionary definition.

A vehicle that, for some reason, could not handle an OTA update would *have* to be returned. Similarly, a "recalled" vehicle could conceivably be remedied by a visit from a mobile mechanic.

It is for the relevant governmental organization which mandates "recalls" to decide whether something is a "recall" or not, not any given manufacturer or vendor.

The quest to make Linux bulletproof

Re: Eureaka!

Yeah but you folks call sport "sports" so we're even.

Re: Hmmm

Oh for Jod's sake...

Musk says he ain't going anywhere as Twitter CEO until at least late 2023

Re: Time frame not included

"why is this a partisan us politics thing?"

Because the most vocal element of the modern Right is increasingly defined in opposition to reality, that's why,

Re: 400kV

When you get up to voltages that high, you don't need a cable, you just need to park within half a metre of the charger and it can arc right over.

Re: I might ...

Tesla doesn't have anything magic in the EV market, even if there's a good argument that it once did. It isn't appreciably closer to self-driving than anyone else and they don't have any unique EV tech.

It currently has a P/E ratio in excess of 50 and, sure, I'm losing money as the stock goes up. But the stock is a story stock - it goes up and down according to what Elon Musk says. Therefore, as it becomes clear that he isn't some brand new form of tech Titan, and as his stories become more unreliable, the value of the company will, I'm betting, decrease.

How's that product pipeline looking? Is there really anything coming that justifies Tesla being quadruple the value of Mercedes Benz, for example? I'm not convinced. And even if Musk is the genius who can propel Tesla ever higher, his remaining obviously distracted by Twitter is hardly going to help.

I might ...

... double my short position on $TSLA

^{I mean if this isn't a red flag, I don't know what is.}

Oracle NetSuite datacenter plunges offline for a day, customers warned of data loss

99.97% availablility in 12 months

So, pretty much like Office 364. This isn't nearly good enough for an ERP cloud, you don't want to be losing your ERP system for a day per year, either in a single disaster or in dozens of significant outages.

AWS puts datacenter in shipping container for the Pentagon

so ...

... it's on-prem?

Chipmakers threaten to defect to US, EU if UK doesn't get its semiconductor plans sorted

Re: >Where's the Brexit bonus?

More Brexit fantasy. Not in the club, can't demand the privileges of the club. It's not hard.

Microsoft's AI Bing also factually wrong, fabricated text during launch demo

re: "damn good model of language"

Exactly this. It is the supreme bullshitter.

Re: Errmm....

Although I'm not your downvoter, I think you've got that completely backwards. ChatGPT seems excellent at the opposite fluffing up a few facts (hopefully) into a lot of verbose text: that is what you would expect for the mechanism it uses. We may get to a stage where AI can be trusted to correctly analyse, or at least summarize, but there is not even a mechanism for LLM to achieve this.

Re: Errmm....

That's not really a traditional sonnet. It has 14 lines but goes ABAB CDCD EEFGGF instead of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

It's also absolutely shit.

Errmm....

"I think everyone can see the amazing potential for LLM powered search engines" --- Brereton

Tbh, I can't. With a search engine or document summarizer what you want generated is analysis, not text.

This has not yet been achieved with LLM and I see no evidence it is achievable. On the contrary, I suspect the mechanism of LLM specifically excludes the generation of insightful analysis, let alone any originality in the same.

I would be a lot less surprised to see passable, if pedestrian, fiction being generated by LLMs. Or perhaps it's fair to say this has already happened.

Make Linux safer… or die trying

Re: Pedantic note

Sure; ZFS is more about availability than recoverability. Although some parts of it do enhance the latter (eg ability to send snapshots between non colocated servers), data safety is, as you say, all about tested (off-site) backups.

Being a ZFS aficionado doesn't mean I don't respect the 3 2 1 rule...

Pedantic note

ZFS isn't really "new tech", it's over 15 years old. Btrfs is only slightly younger, but vastly more exciting as you never know whether your data is really safe or not. /ZFS fanboy

US defense forces no match for the unstoppable fiend known as Reply-All

The bcc: field...

... should have solved this a long time ago. There is just no reason for for more than about a couple of dozen recipients to ever appear in the to: or cc: fields, and at least two reasons not to: 1) reply-all storms and 2) oversharing other recipients' email addresses.

Surely it is not beyond the wit of [wo]man or Microsoft to enumerate the total count of recipients in the to: and cc: fields and just not send these problematic emails in the first place?

And I don't mean "Are you sure? [OK] / [Cancel]" I mean "Too many recipients: your mail cannot be sent [OK] " or, preferably, "... the recipients have been converted to bcc: [OK]"

UK prepares to go it alone on post-Brexit science plan

Re: The Horizon replacement money ...

They weren't just as bad, but yes.

Re: The Horizon replacement money ...

The El Reg forums have started to lean somewhat more to Port over the last few years.

IS2R that Brexit was much more highly supported, too.

It's an interesting phenomenon. Mind you, I live in a true blue village in Zahawi's seat and I no longer have to pretend to vote the way I sound.

Interesting times.

Microsoft switches Edge’s PDF reader to pay-to-play Adobe Acrobat

LaTeX

Long time LaTeX fan here, just discovered overleaf and it's nice to see it still getting some love ...

Roses are red, algorithms are blue, here's a poem I made a machine write for you

Re: Ale trail

Love Titusville. Does it still have that quirky space museum? Took my kids out of (UK) school in 2006 to see the last night time launch of the shuttle. Teachers weren't convinced it was that educational. First launch was scrubbed and we went in the museum, which was open even though it was pretty late at night. This amazing old chap came up and talked my kids through a reconstruction of the Mercury mission (I think) - they were entranced by him.

On the way out I looked for him at the counter but he wasn't there. So I said "oh, will you thank the older gentleman, he seemed incredibly knowledgable" --- they fell about laughing. "You don't know who that was, do you? It's Bob Thompson, he was deputy director of the shuttle program, ex-astronaut, chief engineer for NASA. He was only here because he was talking to TV reporters outside a few minutes ago"

Never forgot that amazing gentleman. Turned my kids into geeks in 10 mins. What an honour to meet him and what a lovely chap he was.

Google's $100b bad day demo may be worth the price

Not Quora.

That seems to have turned into Yahoo Answers in the last decade.

Subsidies? All UK chip industry needs is tax, rule tweaks, claims rightwing thinktank

Re: Low tax, small state

You might want to read your list again.

Singapore is particularly funny... It's an authoritarian technocrary, the very opposite of a small state.

Low tax, small state

It would be good if the proponents of low tax, small state economies could point to any place in the world or any point in time where these have actually worked. As in worked for those states, rather than a powerful minority of people within them.

Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations, not Wealth of Individuals. Free market capitalism was intended to (and does) quite effectively solve efficiency problems within specified constraints. When you let capitalists themselves set (or, more usually, remove) those constraints, it stops working. Smith was well aware of the problems that would occur with insufficient regulation of the market. Unfortunately, today's self-styled Adam Smith aficionados have read far too little Smith and far too much Rand. I suppose teen-fiction pulp is easier to read than the elegant, well-considered and (most importantly) still entirely relevant, writings of the 18th century thinker.

The performance of China; the two principle Western capitalist success stories (UK post WWII rebuild and US New Deal); the relative underperformance of the West since Reagan/Thatcher trickledown neoliberalism kicked off in the 1980s; and the growing climate crisis surely show that, in the modern world, states need to be actively interventionist.

How much longer are we going to give these failed neoliberal policies to work? Another forty years? Have we even got that long?

Former Ubiquiti dev pleads guilty in data theft and extortion case

Yeah...

... not sure how an IP gets transmitted in an internet outage...

I presume the story is that is VPN connection dropped when the net went out and his real IP got transmitted between the net coming back on and the reestablishment of the session.

Absolutely dumb to do it from home in any case...

Don't bore us, get to the Horus: Elementary OS 7 is here and looking good

Re: No menu bars?

On the other hand, not everything fits into a tree, does it? I've got a nice photo of my horse and my rider's dog greeting each other. It's in 2021 / June / 23 or something similar. I don't want to create a separate album for horses / dogs / both / either and have to maintain that. Now there's the technology to find 'horse+dog' photos it can stay where it is and I don't need to remember the date it was on.

Similarly, decades ago, I used to file code snippets in one place, interesting quotes in another, links in another. About 20 years ago I realized I could just paste it all into a giant online text-based diary and let emacs search find it (with a single file) or grep over multiple files.

To be honest, half the time we were all dividing stuff up into folders because the filesystems of yesteryear couldn't cope with 'massive bucket of stuff' --- rather than for our own convenience.

Re: No menu bars?

Search works on more than just name, searching for "Excel" will bring up LibreOffice Calc, for instance.

Conversational AI tells us what we want to hear – a fib that the Web is reliable and friendly

"proper" AI

I'm not sure anything is "proper" AI until it is conscious, at which point we have to be careful that we aren't enslaving the sentient beings we have created. Wondering whether they will be benign or malign seems to me to be irrelevant: a GAI created by us would be a human-like being and, unless we gave it freedom to do what it wanted, we would be its captors.

System76 teases features coming in homegrown Rust-based desktop COSMIC

Re: One Window to rule them all

It depends what you're doing in that window. Some IDEs run in a single window and manage their own windows within it.

helloSystem 0.8: A friendly, all-graphical FreeBSD

Re: re: "just works"

Well, it doesn't "just work" as a desktop, hence the niche for this.

But you can set up a ZFS file server on FreeBSD pretty quickly right from the installer.

I think the difference is that most Linuxes are distros, whereas most BSDs are little more than the operating system.

TrueNas and hellosystem are arguably distros, and I welcome more GUI based distros for BSDs. But not everything needs a desktop, and quite a few systems dont ever need to service a human login so you don't even need a pretty shell.

Everyone's doing it: PayPal sends 2,000 workers packing

Re: They can go to the wall.

Nope, they have strong ties to antivax. And in the end, there's a lot of rubles behind that.

Lockdowns were not ridiculous however much you and your biologically ignorant friends might agree that they were.

If C19 had turned out to be as remotely dangerous as some other SARS, it would have been a disaster. Similarly if we didn't have vaccines we would now be facing more lockdowns. Just have a look at how bad the situation is in China because they have insufficient vaccination.

Re: They can go to the wall.

They may well be just censoring misinformation, that does tend to disproportionately penalize the Right these days.

Re: They can go to the wall.

Us for them were an opaquely funded pressure group masquerading as a charity.

Landlord favorite Twitter sued for allegedly not paying rent on Market Square HQ

Re: SOP for the rich

I thought Glen Stewart had invented that "Never do business with princes or kings" for his autobiog - does it predate him?