Posts by Andy Landy

Static electricity can be shockingly funny, but the joke's over when a rack goes dark

I once had to return a woollen jumper because I kept getting static shocks off it. They gave me a replacement free of charge.

Can AWS really fix AI hallucination? We talk to head of Automated Reasoning Byron Cook

Re: Hallucination aka Wrong

I prefer not to anthropomorphise

You should never anthropomorphise your computers. They don't like that.

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Re: English is one of the easiest human languages

Always remember, it's i before e except after c... right? right?

Except for weird, science, caffeine, sovereign and a couple dozen others. It's a really simple rule as any fule kno!

Techie left 'For support, contact me' sign on a server. Twenty years later, someone did

Re: Well...

Don't believe everything you read in public toilets. Sharon IS NOT up for a good time! What an awkward phone call that was.

Waymo issues software fix after driverless taxi hits telephone pole

please select all images with telephone poles

i'm willing to bet there will be a whole new class of captchas heading our way shortly...

PLACEHOLDER ONLY Someone please write witty headline here

Re: Please speak to George

there were now 3 valid values (yes, no, dont know)

ah, the old classic boolean... True, False and FileNotFound!

IT sent the intern to sort out the nasty VP who was too important to bother with backups

not escape

but had one coworker panic when his keyboard started freaking out. problem was rapidly diagnosed as an open reference manual then had been moved and was resting on some keys with just enough weight to cause mischief

henceforth known as "shift key virus"

Robot mistakes man for box of peppers, kills him

pepper picker popped a proper plonker person

The UK government? On the right track with its semiconductor strategy?

perspective

To put the 1 billion figure into perspective, realise that the the uk govt has already ploughed 1.6 billion into the albatross that is the Bibby Stockholm.

Let that sink in: the future of the UK's high-tech industry - our industry - is worth less than two-thirds of a single ship that will hold 222 refugees.

Samsung's Galaxy S23 Ultra is a worthy heir to the Note

worthy heir to the note

so it's prone to bursting into flames?

FTX cryptovillain Sam Bankman-Fried charged with bribing Chinese officials

Apparently following a databreach at TheRegister two months ago

hmm, that would explain the recent uptick in spam i've been receiving.

if it's true then they've kept that quiet... a bit alarming to be finding out about this in the comments section... quis reportiet ipsos reportes?

Musk said Twitter would open source its algorithm – then fired the people who could

It was alive when you bought it!

Arm co-founder: Britain's chip strat 'couldn’t be any worse'

Re: oxbridge

ah yes, the three proper universities... Oxford, Cambridge and Hull

LastPass admits attackers have a copy of customers’ password vaults

Re: Someone Else's Password

hunter2 ...

Meta faces lawsuit to stop 'surveillance advertising'

Why stop at Meta?

They're all at it...

Inmarsat gets $1b from US Navy for 10 years of satellite data

Commercial teleport services?

Now that would be worth the money!

Record players make comeback with Ikea, others pitching tricked-out turntables

Re: Digital transmission?

I will not buy this tobacconist's, it is scratched!

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

Re: Everybody knows...

Have you ever...

...inadvertently changed the language on your phone? (or had a child do it for you)

indavertently? no, but we once deliberately did it to a friends phone...

it was the late 1990s, and the phone would have been a nokia 6110 or similar

Suomi was, it transpired, an inspired choice

he ended up having to call vodafone support to talk through changing it back :)

Palantir summons specter of nuclear conflict as share price collapses

Don't forget the NHS involvement

Palantir built its reputation creating bespoke solutions such as digital profiling tools for organizations like the CIA and controversial US immigration agency ICE.

Let us not forget their involvement with the NHS. I dread to think what data they have their grubby paws on :(

John Deere tractors 'bricked' after Russia steals machinery from Ukraine

Re: and when they search for information about tractors on the internet to unlock them

I hear his wife is writing him a John Deere letter...

Debugging source is even harder when you can't stop laughing at it

Re: Keyboard test

That wasn't L1-A on a piece of Sun kit was it? I'm having BootPROM flashbacks!

CafePress fined for covering up 2019 customer info leak

How much?

Half a million dollar fine for 20 million users?

So, 2.5 cents per user?

That's an insult to the affected users, barely even a slap on the wrist. Good grief.

Mary Coombs, first woman commercial programmer, dies at 93

Re: First time I heard of her -- thanks!

And don't forget to mention Dame Vera Stephanie "Steve" Shirley and Dina St Johnston, too, if you haven't already...

Margaret Hamilton too. I'm ashamed to say I was ignorant of her until quite recently. Amongst other things, she gave us the term "software engineer"...

UK.gov threatens to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

Re: Dead Cat

How things change. Back when I was of school age it was all about who looked old enough to score a four-pack of kestrel from the local offy.

Weed dispensary software company's ambitions pruned after Spotify trademark clash

some suggestions

facebud

instaganj

skunk skunk go

...i'll get my coat

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

Re: Zig, Rust, Rust, Rust, Go, TypeScript, Haskell, Ć, Python, C#, Elixir, Swift, Java, and Pascal

rust, rust, rust, rust, eggs and rust!

Gnu Nano releases version 6.0 of text editor, can now hide UI frippery

Re: Vi forever

“Ed is the standard text editor.”

BOFH: What if International Bad Actors designed the vaccine to make us watch more Steven Seagal movies?

It's not the nanobots

...the real reason for the global chip shortage is because they're all being put into The Vaccine

*taps forehead knowingly*

A tiny island nation has put the rights to .tv up for grabs – but what’s this? Problematic contract clauses? Again?

Re: Not worth the paper they are written on...

I see what you did there :)

Microsoft's UWP = Unwanted Windows Platform?

i'm confused

if you're not happy with the current functionality... why would you even be using it?

Compromise reached as Linux kernel community protests about treating compiler warnings as errors

Re: Not so simple

ctags is your friend

Banned: The 1,170 words you can't use with GitHub Copilot

Re: Wot, no GOTO?

this page has an excellent discussion about the quake fast inverse square root, including how to generalise it to other powers:

http://h14s.p5r.org/2012/09/0x5f3759df.html

Facebook says dump of 533m accounts is old news. But my date of birth, name, etc haven't changed in years, Zuck

Re: I need to look this up

that sounds like a very dry cough, have you been tested recently? :)

IBM, Red Hat face copyright, antitrust lawsuit from SCO Group successor Xinuos

Xinuos

don't forget to audit your thetans this fish day!

Ministry of Defence tells contractors not to answer certain UK census questions over security fears

Re: UK Law

Please contact the MMB

the Ministry of Murder and Bombs?

Open-source contributors say they'll pull out of Qt as LTS release goes commercial-only

Qt is GPL-licensed

actually Qt is a proper mish-mash of licenses: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/licenses-used-in-qt.html

i've used Qt on and off for many years now, so this change is all a bit sad

does anyone here have any experience of CopperSpice (https://www.copperspice.com/)? been thinking about making the jump myself for a year or two now, curious to hear of anyone else's experience.

Take your pick: 'Hack-proof' blockchain-powered padlock defeated by Bluetooth replay attack or 1kg lump hammer

in any case, that's all I have for you today :)

Ever wonder how a pentest turns into felony charges? Coalfire duo explain Iowa courthouse arrest debacle

Re: "the team said the plod were actually rather cordial"

'round here we say "the dibble" which suffers the same syntactic indignity as "the plod" but lacks a reference text for people to wave in your face.

that would be Officer Dibble from Top Cat...

Rust code in Linux kernel looks more likely as language team lead promises support

Re: Is there a reason we need YAPL?

I write functionally safe software as part of my day job, and while rust has some nice features, I couldn't advocate using it fo a FS project because it's just too immatue.

Yes, yes, rust is over 10 years old, but there were 6 releases this year alone. That's not stable. The static analysis tools I've seen all seem fairly primitive compared to those for, say C. Disclaimer: not checked rust sca tools for a while, so it's possible things have improved.

But when the rust language team lead writes on that lmkl thread that "I'd be happy to have the Linux kernel feeding into Rust language development priorities", it just screams "constantly evolving, not mature - avoid!". Rust can beat the safety drum all it wants, but unless and until it is stable and mature, I can't see it gaining any acceptance in the functional safety world.

Give it another 10 years then maybe, just maybe. But they need to nail it down and get out of the habit of doing a new release every few weeks.

Oh what a cute little animation... OH MY GOD. (Not acceptable, even in the '80s)

Re: Regrets cut both ways

my tumble dryer manual says "do not tumble dry items that have been washed in petrol"

GitHub to replace master with main across its services

Re: Master copy

"Changing the name alone is pointless"

this, a thousand times this

it reminds me of the spastics society rebranding as scope, because in playgrounds up and down the country, the word "spastic" was used as an insult. intended result: stop people using the word spastic. actual result: we gained the word "scoper"

'I wrote Task Manager': Ex-Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer spills the beans

Re: It hasn't been able to kill lots of stuff

no, just -9

Beer rating app reveals homes and identities of spies and military bods, warns Bellingcat

go to the pub?

"Untappd’s concept of operations is simple. You go to the pub and drink beer."

i wish :(

Could it be? Really? The Year of Linux on the Desktop is almost here, and it's... Windows-shaped?

DirectX is coming

curiously, an initial patchset at supporting DirectX in linux has just been posted to the lists:

http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2005.2/03609.html

make of that what you will...

Getting a pizza the action, AS/400 style

Re: ONU

uppercase vowel free

historically yes, though IBM eventually made amends of a sort by introducing the "EIEIO" instruction to PowerPC :)

Virtually – no – actually borked: We'd slap ailing ATM's 'OK' button but it's probably against government guidance

Re: By the way......

https://github.com/hyperrealm/talkfilters

IT services sector faces armageddon as COVID-19 lockdown forces project cancellations – analysts

Re: 1984

We have always been at war with Eastasia...

After four years, Rust-based Redox OS is nearly self-hosting

Re: 3 seconds boot time?

may or may not be the issue you are seeing, but there was a recent discussion on the kernel mailing list about boot blocking due to lack of entropy

lwn has a summary here: https://lwn.net/Articles/800509/