Posts by Paul Johnston

Boffins ponder paltry brain data rate of 10 bits per second

Love the title

Obviously a fan of Kundera.

US Army should ditch tanks for AI drones, says Eric Schmidt

I claim my prize

You are the Chieftain

With Asmi 24.04, Ubuntu's never looked so snappy (without the Snaps)

Getting rid of snap

This makes sense if like me you look after 550 PCs running Ubuntu where users have NFS mounted home directories.

AstraZeneca bets $247M AI can create a cancer-fighting antibody

Which AI algorithm

I took a course in AI 25 years ago and remember something called a genetic algorithm.

It was suppose to mimic natural selection by adding noise to the model and them checking for fitness and iteratively repeating.

The theory was that would get a better model.

Nothing new under the sun!

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

Re: Every single time

Yes closest to the network port, keyboard in the lowest USB port mouse one up.

1 in 5 VMware customers plan to jump off its stack next year

Bonanza

I can see this being a fantastic time to be a snake oil salesperson.

The Pitch

So you have lost a lot of in house technical staff and you are being shafted with double digit price rises.

Let us map moving off your complicated VMWare to AcmeSuperVirtualisation, only a couple of years at the brilliant rate of £1000 per day.

Take the money when it all comes crashing down and retire to wherever you fancy.

Simples!

Not like we all have not seen that before!

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Don't get me started!!

Like the senior professor of Human Computer Interaction who produced a CD with a website on it showing off all his great work and skills.

Right down to customising the links, changing them to a colour, the one for which the term grey-ed out was invented.

Core blimey, Intel's answer to AMD and Ampere's cloudy chips has 288 of them

Miss an opportunity there

Pity they didn't limit it to 286

Eating disorder non-profit pulls chatbot for emitting 'harmful advice'

Colour me surprised

Chatbot spouting toxic rubbish. Who would have thought that might happen?

Britain's largest private pension scheme reveals scale of Capita break-in

Count me in!

Just got an email from USS saying that they are sorry but they are confident in their robust procedures.

Starlink opens final frontier for radio astronomers

Re: Can I...

I saw two shooting stars last night...

Forget general AI, apparently zebrafish larvae can count

Re: Jumping to conclusions?

Whilst agreeing these studies are extremely challenging the article says bar density was varied which would suggest that its not as simple as darker. I would have thought that was probably the first condition that was thought about which would need to be controlled for.

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

Re: FUBAR

I sometimes think of certain users as a minor threat.

Check out Codon: A Python compiler if you have a need for C/C++ speed

Re: Codon ? Colon more like

Reminds me when you would have a shed load of jres, basically one per app.

Have to laugh at the name

Recently I wrote a series of programmes to handle the codons in a fasta file. One of the languages was python. Will be interesting to see if codons handles codons faster.

Polish for Windows Spotlight and tabs for Notepad in latest Insiders build

Re: Polish for Windows Spotlight and ...

Or more importantly does it do the dark L?

Move over, graphene. There's a new super-material in town: Graphullerene

A little accuracy would be nice

>>The first, graphene, is the well-known two-dimensional lattice of carbon atoms which provoked such enthusiasm and speculation following its discovery at the UK's University of Manchester in 2004

Since UoM only came into existence in 2004 it's amazing how it's discovery has been attributed to that organisation

To quote the wikipedia page

>> In 2001 he became a professor of physics at the University of Manchester, wow time travel too.

Almost like someone is trying to airbrush UMIST out of history

'Multiple security breaches' shut down trucker protest

Re: Superspreader? Give me a break.

I'd love to say it is over but COVID-19 and its ramifications will be with us for some time. The one good thing I see is the true advent of mRNA vaccines.

Windows Subsystem for Linux now packaged as a Microsoft Store app

This is good IMHO

>> and the ability to run Linux GUI apps under Windows 10.

China chip imports down 12.4% as tech trade war with US intensifies

Question

Are you really sure China is self sufficient in food?

Even if it is not sure how long this can last, degradation of food producing land is especially concerning for China?

Have a look at https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1197577.shtml

Cheers Paul J

We've seen things you people wouldn't believe. A planet, dense as a marshmallow, that would float on water

Nominative determinism

Guess you believe it will sink and end up in your locker.

Liz Truss ousted as UK prime minister, outlived by online lettuce

Re: Please help me here

Just come back from Iraq, not sure how modern a secular state can be considered if it gasses it's own people.

Reverse DNS queries may reveal too much, computer scientists argue

Privacy bah!

Sort of like when you are on a train and the WiFi shows the names of peoples devices and they often have the owners name included. If you were so inclined going upto someone and saying "Hi xxxx " when you think you have narrowed it down to a likely individual is not a good thing. IMHO

Claims of AI sentience branded 'pure clickbait'

Re: generally agree...

Can you quote your sources for that please

BOFH: Where do you think you are going with that toner cartridge?

Band Name

I was told once "Rage against the machine" was clearly about a printer.

Sounds plausible to me.

FreeBSD 13.1 is out for everything from PowerPC to x86-64

Question

Anyone got thoughts on the version of OpenSSL being 1.1.1?

Seems Linux is moving to version 3 and we for one are having issues with it and our Palo Alto boxes.

Cheers Paul J

One in five employees at top Indian outsourcers left in the past year

Bloody hell

You mean that it can get worse?

Windows 11 usage stats within touching distance of... XP

Upto 8 and counting

Seems we have 8 Win 11 machines in our Active Directory, I love ADFind!

AlmaLinux comes to Windows Subsystem for Linux

Re: Serves a roll

Sorry didn't specify enough these are not people wanting to go into IT, per se CFD is computational fluid dynamics.

Re: Serves a roll

Best of luck with that. We have students paying huge amounts to study an engineering discipline. To tell them that they have to spend a shed load of time in the operating system realm when they are only concerned with the application level just isn't going to happen. Sometimes we forget that end users are end users. It's not slagging them off, just realising for them it is a tool to and end and not the end game itself.

Serves a roll

Whilst WSL may not be everyone's cup of tea I find it really useful. We don't have a managed Ubuntu image yet and using WSL2 allows people to run CFD tools like openfoam without having to resort to dual boot machines. If they actually need lots of raw processing power they can prototype on their laptops or desktops before moving to bigger iron. Most students have no knowledge of sys admin so why not keep that away from them unless they actually want/ need to?

Patch now: RCE Spring4shell hits Java Spring framework

Re: Whose?

Love the optimism but by that way I don't think anything would get done. Have known people who just want to get stuff out asap and others who are incapable of this as they need "one more check" . It's all a case of balance. Finally it's not as if the bad actors play like that. Offense and defence are both advancing and so will it ever be.

Linux 5.17 debuts after 'very calm' extra week of work

This one has lost me!

>>Version 5.18 of the kernel is tipped to feature the debut of Intel's plans for "software-defined silicon" – a tech about which Intel has remained virtually silent, other than hints on mailing lists about features that would allow payments to enable different features in processors.

How do you feature something we know nothing about, well your guess is as good as mine?

Linux Snap package tool fixes make-me-root bugs

Not looking good

Just went to update one of my Ubuntu installs and got this, not encouraging.

Preparing to unpack .../12-snapd_2.54.3+20.04.1ubuntu0.1_amd64.deb ...

Unpacking snapd (2.54.3+20.04.1ubuntu0.1) over (2.54.2+20.04ubuntu2) ...

Setting up snapd (2.54.3+20.04.1ubuntu0.1) ...

Installing new version of config file /etc/apparmor.d/usr.lib.snapd.snap-confine.real ...

error: cannot read the state file: open /var/lib/snapd/state.json: no such file or directory

RAID expansion comes to OpenZFS at last

Re: Modern File System Clarification

No I meant AFS hence the joke alert!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_File_System

I work for an organisation which is claimed to make as much as Man Utd and Man City put together and runs a mission critical business system on the Andrew File System

Modern File System

AFS?

Linux distros haunted by Polkit-geist for 12+ years: Bug grants root access to any user

Oh dear

I know 9 is essentially in beta-ish and this is just a learning box, nothing in production but doesn't inspire confidence

(base) [paulj@e-uxxmcasspj5 ~]$ cat /etc/redhat-release

CentOS Stream release 9

(base) [paulj@e-uxxmcasspj5 ~]$ ./cve-2021-4034--2022-01-25-0936.sh

This script (v1.0) is primarily designed to detect CVE-2021-4034 on supported

Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems and kernel packages.

Result may be inaccurate for other RPM based systems.

This script is meant to be used only on RHEL 6-8.

ASUS recalls motherboards that flame out thanks to backwards capacitors

Re: It was fun when I saw that happen

Not sure how you type Morse word by word but anyone who can do Morse is better than I ever was, despite doing O-Level Seamanship and have tried to get a "Full Amateur Radio License". Passed the electronics exam but never the Morse for the full fat version :-(

Neat!

“In our ongoing investigation, we have preliminarily identified a potential reversed memory capacitor issue in the production process from one of the production lines that may cause debug error code 53, no post, or motherboard components damage,” said ASUS in an announcement.

I'm going to start using "debug error code 53" for when it all goes pear shaped.

Obvious icon usage!

Nottingham University awards cloud finance and HR deal in £29.75m deal 2.5 years after Unit4 upgrade

Not sure

How an HR system, yes we do need them, will create a step change in Teaching and Research?

Here the biggest complaint about HR is the time taken to recruit staff and issues with extending fixed term contracts.

Even sorting that out isn't going to make much difference YMMV

£42k for a top-class software engineer? It's no wonder uni research teams can't recruit

Re: IT person

The pensions scheme you mentioned probably isn't as good as you think.

The recent industrial action at universities has multiple causes but the pension is probably the biggest.

Windows Terminal to be the default for command line applications in Windows 11

Re: When will I be able to ...

When the GUI in Windows 11 goes TITSUP what else is there?

Can understand that from a server point of view but we are talking about desktop OS here.

NixOS and the changing face of Linux operating systems

After much wracking of brain cells

Reminds me of SmartOS where the OS is in memory and sort of immutable

Alpine Linux 3.15 bids a fond farewell to MIPS64 support

What really interests me is...

"There is also some initial support for UEFI secure boot on x86_64"

At the moment we have to set machines which are going to be dual boot (Win 10/ Scientific Linux 7) to legacy boot.

Don't as why Scientific Linux 7 please :-(

Academics tell Brit MPs to check the software used when considering reproducibility in science and tech research

Sounds familiar

Is it raining where you are?

'Automate or die!' Gartner reckons most biz apps will be developed via low-code by the people who use them

Don't knock it

There are a lot of things I haven't tried that I am willing to knock.

Morris Dancing ....

Ex-org? Not at all! Three and a half years after X.Org Server 1.20, 1.21 is released

Dear Povilas Kanapickas

Please see icon

Windows terminates here. Please remember to finish setting it up on arrival

Re: It's a sign I tell you...

Perhaps they should look at using Ruby!

Severe joke alert :-)

We're all at sea: Navigation Royal Navy style – with plenty of IT but no GPS

Re: Another thing to make me feel old!

You would probably enjoy reading

The Observer's Book on Astro-Navigation Parts One and Two

Written by a certain Francis Chichester and first published in 1940

Amazing what you can find in old book shops

Another thing to make me feel old!

When I was at school one of the O-Levels it ran was Navigation.

If anyone happens to have any old papers I'd love to see one (cursory google in progress!)