Posts by Geoff Campbell

Linux 6.18 arrives as the year's final drop and likely next LTS

Re: Apparently the kernel is deteriorating

Ah, the wonderfully tribal nature of the FOSS community doesn't take long to show its feral teeth in any conversation, does it?

GJC

Google tries to trump iPhone launch with AI-powered Pixel 10 range

Re: Fairphone 6

A great choice, for a whole bunch of reasons, and a company that deserves all the encouragement they can get.

GJC

Re: Uses of AI

I agree that AI is more useful in well-bounded data sets, within organisations, and I expect it to very quickly take over in things like telephone helplines, especially for stuff like account queries or product knowledge.

But it does also make a very good general Internet search engine, especially since the more mainstream search companies like Google have become so very poor. As I say, the key is to find one that provides references for its findings, like Perplexity or CoPilot.

GJC

Re: Thousand bucks for a phone

Well, on the one hand a thousand bucks for something you will use several hours a day for several years is actually not bad value, but on the other hand the FairPhone 6 fits my needs *far* better for only £500, so that was an easy decision to make.

If a thousand bucks makes you choke on your cornflakes, I rather suggest that you don't look at the Samsung foldables.

GJC

Re: "It is rather the equivalent of remembering where I left my keys."

It's interesting to note that certain people of my acquaintance absolutely rave about Apple AirTags, and before that about Tile et al, precisely because they cannot remember such simple information.

So, yeah, there's probably a good market for a digital PA that's always in your feeds.

GJC

Re: Uses of AI

Generative AI is certainly bullshit, at least as it exists today. That may change, it may not.

AI as a tool to search through and present data from the Internet, i.e. as a search engine, is utterly fabulous, as long as you choose one that presents references for its finds. I use Perplexity, and it has cut my search times to a fraction of what they were previously, so much so that I happily pay $200/year for the Pro version.

GJC

AI crawlers and fetchers are blowing up websites, with Meta and OpenAI the worst offenders

Rate limiting

This is very true, and for certain of my customers I have been saying "Rate limiting" at their service providers repeatedly for quite a few years now. I think I might finally be getting some traction.

GJC

Anarchy in the AI: Trump's desire to supercharge US tech faces plenty of hurdles

Re: "the risks and consequences are obvious to everyone"

I confess to a certain dark fascination with just how far, and how fast, the whole country will unravel before some adults step up to the plate. I just hope it happens before the UK follows their example.

GJC

"the risks and consequences are obvious to everyone"

Would that this were true. There is a whole class of people, now very prominent in UK and US politics, for whom the religious "regulation is bad, m'kay?" mantra is the start and end of it. Even if they thought that there might be some considerations beyond that, they don't have the wit, wisdom, or empathy(*) to think through consequences of actions.

And, yes, this largely aligns with the Tories in the UK and the Republicans in the USA, the feral, bastard, brain-damaged offspring of Thatcher and Reagan. Which observation will, I am sure, rile up a whole bunch of people hereabouts. Ask me if I care?

GJC

(*) Yes, it's an Oxford comma. I rather like them. Bite me.

Yes, I wrote a very expensive bug. In my defense I was only seven years old at the time

3D phone bills

Back in the '90s, we had the confluence of three very useful things:

1) Itemised phone bills

2) ISDN lines giving almost-instant connections

3) Ethernet bridges with ISDN interfaces that allowed site-to-site connections without costly leased lines.

As a result, I coined the term "3D phone bill" for the first bill after a pair of these bridges was installed, that invariably arrived in one or more boxes of several thousand A4 sheets after the bridges had been making then hanging up a connection every few seconds for three months, at a minimum call fee per call (was it 5p back then? I forget).

I made quite good money for a while reconfiguring these setups to filter for broadcast and multicast traffic before bringing the line up, and to keep the line up for the full time allowed by that minimum call fee.

GJC

AMD puts Intel in rear view mirror with Threadripper Pro 9000 high-end desktop chips

Re: Price

It was ever thus. Hobbyists in the '70s couldn't afford a Cray to do serious atomic modelling on. Hobbyists in the '90s couldn't afford a good CFD rig to fine-tune their racing car. Hobbyists in the '20s can't afford a room full of H100s to run AI on. So what?

GJC

Re: Price

If you have the kind of workload that genuinely requires that sort of horsepower, the cost of the CPU(s) will be a rounding error in the overall budget.

GJC

LastOS slaps neon paint on Linux Mint and dares you to run Photoshop

Re: Bloatware Linux

I think anything that came as part of Powertoys can be considered Official Microsoft, no matter what the origin, no?

GJC

How sticky notes saved 'the single biggest digital program in the world'

Re: "assumptions don't turn out to be what humans look like when you hit them"

UBI would instantly remove the power of employers to rule over their employees. Government policy is decided by those employers. Ergo, UBI will never happen, sadly.

GJC

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

Re: TODO

Hell, I know lots about Linux, I've been using it since, I dunno, 1995, and I *still* have no idea which distro to choose. It's a bloody minefield.

GJC

Microsoft tries to knife passwords once and for all – at least for consumers

Re: M$ Wants Biometric ID - Sure Hold-on a second ... - NOT.

I'm not sure that I see the problem here.

If you want the facilities, install the App. If you can live without those facilities, don't install the App. No problem, certainly no call to get stressed and angry about it - how's your blood pressure?

For the record, though, both Android and iOS give perfectly good, easy to use, ways to control what these Apps can do and access. The permissions systems are very fine-grained and easy to restrict if that's your thing.

GJC

Amazon’s first 27 Kuiper broadband sats make it into orbit on an Atlas V

Re: Launch cost

I don't think that's a very valid comparison. Only some of SpaceX's profit comes from Starlink, they also make money from selling launch services and from longer-term government projects.

GJC

Re: Launch cost

Oh, yes, I remember being puzzled by that at the time it was published.

All I can say is that three years of real-world usage of the system including a whole bunch of video conferences and voice calls didn't show up any problems at all.

GJC

Re: Launch cost

I used Starlink for three years without any noticeable jitter of significant magnitude, including in some long-term network monitoring tools. Got a reference for that claim?

We'll see how the services fare. It's a bit of an irrelevance to me now, as I won't do business with either of them, but I'm still interested to see how the services work out.

GJC

Launch cost

It's difficult to see how Kuiper can compete with Starlink while they are paying for other company's disposable rockets. I assume their business model is based on getting New Glenn running and properly reusable before too much longer, to directly compete with the costs of the Starlink plus either Falcon 9 or Starship combination.

GJC

NASA doubles odds of Moon hitting near-Earth asteroid

Seveneves

I thought the opening line was absolutely brilliant, and I didn't ever feel the need for an explanation. It was in the finest traditions of SF, a simple "What if..?" question where the premise doesn't have to be endlessly explained and unpicked, because it's the results that are important, not the root cause.

GJC

UK government told to get a grip on £23B tech spend

Re: Too big

Hell yes. I lost count of the number of arguments I had in the '80s with idiots saying that the new computer system must be *exactly* the same as the old paper system, otherwise it was a failure.

They just couldn't grasp that this was a new set of tools, fundamentally different to the old tools, which allowed new and better ways of working.

Oh, well, it's all ancient history now.

GJC

China’s chip champ Loongson teases trio of new processors for lappies, factories, maybe servers too

Re: Benchmarks

I think 8-bit integer calculations are used a lot in AI, aren't they?

GJC

"But eight-core CPUs at 2.5GHz won’t scare Intel or AMD"

Well, they should. Every successful challenger started with a credible, usable, but behind-the-curve option. Where will Loongson be in another five years? Two years behind? One year? Fully caught up? Or out of business?

Interesting times to be living in.

GJC

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

Re: How?

I lived through a lot of that in the '70s. IRA bomb threats happened all the time in Britain, we'd often get herded out of swimming pools or cinemas. Almost all either fake, or so easily found and dealt with that they might as well have been.

But just enough that got serious to keep everyone on their toes.

GJC

Re: How?

I have long said that terrorists are really rather stupid people, targeting the high-profile and (at least theoretically) well guarded sites.

Small, cheap incendiary devices on electric substations, train signalling equipment, telephone exchanges, and so on would cause absolute chaos and huge irritation, with just about zero risk.

GJC

Google’s broadband balloon laser comms tech floated out as independent company

WISP services

One of my ISP connections here is a WISP service using point-to-point WiFi repeaters in a mesh over the fields. Works well enough, but at 20-30Mbps and with regular drop-outs, I'd be very happy to see them replaced with 20Gbps laser devices.

Don't know how well laser would cope with Welsh weather, though.

GJC

Broadcom has won. 70 percent of large VMware customers bought its biggest bundle

Re: For now

That was exactly my first thought. Migrating a big virtual installation isn't trivial, so customers will be buying time to evaluate and plan.

GJC

As Alibaba launches server-grade RISC-V CPU, Beijing throws its weight behind ISA

Re: RISC-V needs a new OS paradigm

Is that a facet of the ISA, or of current implementations of it? The CPU core design appears to be gather ing pace, which might fix those problems?

GJC

Reading Chinese

Google Translate. Sorted.

GJC

SpaceX receives FAA blessing for another Starship test

Oh no!

Won't somebody please think of the children!

GJC

Hundreds of Dutch medical records bought for pocket change at flea market

Re: I've got a stack

A few years back, a friend of mine died. I volunteered to help his widow clear out his hoard of, well, everything, really. We had a decent wake in my shed during which we recommissioned a couple of motorbikes he'd owned for decades, which I'm sure he would have enjoyed.

Anyway, after that, I started in on his hoard of computer gear. He'd spent about four decades tinkering with his own computers, and supporting a couple of small organisations and his entire extended family. And he'd never thrown anything away. There were several rooms and a decently large shed packed with bits of old computers, including every hard disk and memory stick he'd every used, replaced, or stored. Some were dated, including 5.25" SCSI units from 1984.

I bought two large car-loads back home and spent a very therapeutic couple of weeks recovering what data I could, which all fitted onto a single modern hard disk, then introducing the disks to a pillar drill and sledgehammer before dropping the remains off at the tip.

GJC

Mobile operators brace for bigger, faster headaches with 6G

Re: 4g is fine

Yup. We don't need higher peak bandwidth, we need much better availability of average bandwidth.

GJC

Why AI benchmarks suck

Re: puzzles...that AI models try to solve as a measure of intelligence

The absolute pinnacle would be an AI seeing, by chance, the Times crossword on a researcher's desk, and saying "I'd like to have a crack at that, so I'll ask the owner to photocopy it for me so I don't spoil his chance to enjoy what he paid for".

GJC

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

Re: What people really want

ICE isn't half the cost of EV these days (comparing like-for-like, obviously), your information is very out of date.

But yes, sure, you can buy a second-hand diesel car for a lot less than a brand new EV. This isn't going to be headline news any time soon.

GJC

Re: Heil Wankpanzer...?

They never have. If they take a car as trade-in, they will sometimes remove some software options before selling it on at auction, notably free Supercharging. This was widely misreported when it first became known.

GJC

Re: What to expect

Most of the standard car parts that make up my Model S85 are either Mercedes or Brembo. I've found them to be very high quality over the eight years I've been tinkering with it.

GJC

Re: Oh, and...

The Octopus tariff we're on gets you 7p/kWh for all usage 23:30-05:30, you just need to own an EV to be eligible for it. We run everything in the house on electricity already, with heating and hot water both run from storage systems that heat themselves up overnight on the cheap juice.

In fact, that's going to be the limitation on any battery system here - we already bang up hard against the 80A capacity of the incoming fuse, often for hours at a time overnight, so I need to tread carefully.

GJC

Re: One piece of anecdata

Polestar would probably be my second choice, certainly. But Tesla have better software, and the Supercharger network. Some of those are now open to other makes (something around 50% of sites in the UK, from memory), but the Tesla vehicles know all about them right in the SatNav, and the integration is superb.

GJC

Re: One piece of anecdata

You do need to be a little careful. Tesla treat the battery pack as a single FRU, so any failure tends to give a fairly sizeable bill, whereas there are lots of third parties that will drop the pack, open it up, repair what needs repairing, and put it back.

I had the battery management module replaced in my pack last year. Even paying a third party to do the work, it was only a hair over £1,000 - I could have done it myself, dropping the pack out is easy enough so long as you have access to a two-post lift (which I do).

Anyway, we'll see. If I do decide to sell it, it should go well enough, as it's an early model with free Supercharging, which are quite sought-after.

GJC

Re: What people really want

Speak for yourself. We've been driving electric cars for eight years, and we would never go back to internal combustion. They're just so slow, noisy, and generally primitive, and as icing on the cake they're so expensive to run.

GJC

Re: Oh, and...

As I suspect that an 11 year old, 150,000 miles Model S might be a bit difficult to sell on the second-hand market now, I think I'll probably dismantle it for the 16 battery packs, and convert them into storage for the house. It'll be nice to still have use out of the money we spent on the car.

GJC

One piece of anecdata

I bought a 2014 Model S second-hand from Tesla in 2017. Tesla looked after me very well over the years, and the car has been great.

Now that it is coming to the end of its life, I was thinking of replacing it with a Model 3 in a year or two. But that idea started to look a bit poor when Musk started supporting Trump, and now with his recent behaviour it's completely off the board. I do still think that Tesla cars are the best in the market, but the competition are getting closer to them, so it won't be too much of a blow to buy something else. Maybe something Korean or Chinese, I'll have a closer look into the options later.

So, yeah. This previously happy Tesla owner has been lost to the brand directly and specifically because of Musk. Just one data point, of course.

GJC

Re: Heil Wankpanzer...?

Transferring ownership of a Tesla is easy. There's an option right in the App to do so, takes minutes.

This comment does not imply any level of approval for Tesla, however. Just correcting a minor point of information.

GJC

Amazon's Kuiper secures license to take on Starlink in the UK

"A certain person"

Bezos was stood alongside Musk with the other tech-bros at the inauguration of the orange shit-gibbon.

Boycott them all. I've just replaced my Starlink with an ADSL service, I am not giving any more business to any American organisation until they regain sanity.

GJC

Want Intel in your Surface? That’ll be $400 extra, says Microsoft

Re: Why?

I can only speak for myself. The Windows/Office/OneDrive ecosystem is beautifully integrated and removes any trace of dependence on individual machines. I can bounce from desktop to laptop without missing a beat, and if any machine gets stolen/broken/whatever I can buy a new one off the shelf and be back up and running with no data loss in minutes.

Use what you choose, and allow others the same courtesy. We all have out requirements and reasons.

GJC

Apple again? Every sodding time.

The Surface Pro X running Windows on ARM was released over a year before Apple released their ARM Mac range. It was a thing of beauty.

GJC

Re: Why would anyone want any Microsoft Surface?

Yes, but then I would have to use the train-wreck that is MacOS. Hateful.

GJC

Re: Why would anyone want any Microsoft Surface?

Yup. I used a Surface Pro X for five years as my main travelling machine, and it was glorious. So I bought a Surface Pro 11 as soon as they were released, and that too is glorious. Windows on ARM is not going away, I would say.

Buy what you like, but do not write off other people's choices based on some weird herd instinct.

GJC

Tesla's numbers disappoint again ... and the crowd goes wild ... again

Tesla Board

If the Board of Directors at Tesla have the best interests of the company at heart, they will get rid of Musk as soon as possible. We'll see.

GJC