Posts by Munchausen's proxy

Arm IPO kicks off today with CPU slinger valued at $54.5B

Re: British chip designer to trade on Nasdaq only

While we will of course "lose" those businesses to the US stock exchanges in the short term, when the bubble bursts on the hugely overvalued tech companies in the US then presumably there will be screamed questions at the regulators that enabled losing hundreds of billions.

No, here in the US we've been pretty thoroughly conditioned to believe that any corporate regulation is pure evil, and any consequences to our personal financial status should be blamed on whichever politician of the other party has had his name in the news most recently.

Toyota servers ran out of storage, crashed production at 14 plants in Japan

From part of that description, it sounded like they might have had Prod and Backup on two separate VMs on the same host, maybe with guest storage limits calculated a little too precisely?

From browser brat to backend boss: Will WASM win the web wars?

Re: Utterly Pointless

Its doomed because the browser is a an hoc architecture, its primarily a display mechanism used to interact with human users

I'd argue the browser is primarily a data collection mechanism used to impose advertising (and other propaganda) on human users.

University cuts itself off from internet after mystery security snafu

Re: MTS

They’d have been fine if they’d still been running MTS.

Which Host?

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

Re: _Bottom_ posted?

"BTW: Green Card Lottery was not the first SPAM I encountered on UseNet, "

Dave Rhodes -- 'Bizman Dave, the modem slave' -- predated C & S by a considerable amount, in my fallible memory. I vaguely think that Rhodes may have started out on Fidonet, but I'm certain he was shitting on Usenet before the lawyers.

Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

Re: Wrapping at column 78

I've only recently switched from Opera v 12, because my workplace moved almost entirely to Microsoft for email, and I can't get Opera to talk successfully to Microsoft's smtp server. (Evolution does, with a plugin). It's painful. I still keep Opera running on one screen for the excellent search capability, and automatic sorting intelligently by date (on disk).

Five billion phones are dead in drawers – carriers want to mine them

Re: Data

" (But no more than a few. 3 seconds is plenty to total a CD/DVD via an impressive lightning show. So not much more than this to avoid a conflagration.)"

So, you're saying that shalt thou count to three. No more. No less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three?

I suppose five is right out.

Why would a keyboard pack a GPU and run Unreal Engine? To show animations beneath the clear keys, natch

Re: Bit of a gimmicky letdown with squandered potential

Am I the only person who was completely underwhelmed? I was expecting something like a more affordable version of the Optimus Maximus keyboard from fifteen years(!) ago with individual OLEDs in the keycaps, letting you dynamically update and indicate their functionality. That idea had a lot of potential, regardless of how it was implemented. (*)

Interestingly, YouTube gave me a suggestion after I watched the finalmouse thing, and showed me this: Flux Keyboard - The Keyboard Reinvented -- which looks to be exactly a relatively inexpensive implementation of the best ideas of the Optimus and the finalmouse Enterprise. (Pre orders from their website show $450 USD). Do a search on YouTube for "flux keyboard" and they have a direct comparison with the Enterprise keyboard as well. I really really want one; maybe even enough to pre-order.

Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs

Re: What About The Current Resident?

So that means you need to know things even when you don't need to know them. You need to know them not because you need to know them but because you need to know whether or not you need to know. If you don't need to know, you still need to know so that you know that there is no need to know.

You are Kurt Gödel, and I claim my five pounds.

Sysadmin and IT ops jobs to slump, says IDC

Re: A generous helping of crispy crunchy word salad

"Or is ChatGPT writing their material these days?"

May as well -- it's going to be writing all that software they claim sysadmins are going to be producing.

Microsoft's big bet on helium-3 fusion explained

"So they need to produce a fusion reactor to produce fuel for the fusion reactor. If they have the first one working why would they need the second?"

The first reaction doesn't need to produce net energy, just He-3. The pair of them need to be net positive for energy, though.

One of the world's most prominent blockchain apps looks like being binned

Re: Blockchain not at fault

You might own the artwork, but the ownership class owns the law. Good luck.

Your security failure was so bad we have to close the company … NOT!

IHTFP

This was done to the President of MIT, although not quite so firmly as drywall:

http://hacks.mit.edu/by_year/1990/vest_bboard/

How prompt injection attacks hijack today's top-end AI – and it's tough to fix

Re: This article pins the tail to the AI balloon

"This column is an expansive exercise in rephrasing "garbage in; garbage out"."

I think of the chatbots as being 'Electric Wikipedia'. (with all that implies). Maybe we really should feed a couple of them into each other, and let them dissolve into a singularity of editor wars, while the rest of us move on to the next shiny. Quantum, I guess.

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

Re: Well that was unfortunate.

"Who, on their right mind, would take offense of a nickname from a time before they appeared, therefore, obviously not aimed at them ?"

Maybe a woman who doesn't like the implication that a random woman can be blamed for any and every problem, and people accept that as a good tech support response?

Texas mulls law forcing ISPs to block access to abortion websites

Re: Depressing news

"Can they make up for it with gun sales?"

No, it's a pharmacy so it will be fentanyl and oxycontin.

Petaflops help scientists understand why some COVID-19 variants are more contagious

Re: Seems familiar

"Sounds like night clubbing on the weekend to me"

Over a large population, the math is probably pretty similar.

Google staff asked to share desk space in latest cost purge

Re: whither all the Google real estate?

Maybe they plan to convert it all to condos. Sell at ridiculous prices to the currently wealthy and desperate to live in Silicon Valley, soak them for monthly fees as well, and hit them up for insane assessments when the buildings need maintenance. Then when the inevitable crash comes, spin off the Residential Group into a strategic bankruptcy and walk away.

Ain't that America?

White Castle collecting burger slingers' fingerprints looks like a $17B mistake

Full steam ahead

Brilliant piece of word-slinging. My compliments to the author.

Crypto craziness craps out – and about time too

We can hope, but

"Fintech, you're better than this."

Are they, though? Are they?

FTX disarray declared 'unprecedented' by exec who cleaned up after Enron

Re: Next chapter

"(a) The whole bitcon scam is exposed for what it is, politicians now call for its abolition, banks refuse to touch it, and "

Bank banks might refuse to touch it. Investment banks love that shit.

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

Re: The Twitterverse will soon be silent

When does their domain name expire? Because I bet the guy whose job it was to remember to renew it is gone.

Musk tells of risk of Twitter bankruptcy as tweeters trash brands

More and more

More and more I get the feeling that yes, indeed, he is deliberately trying to completely destroy Twitter - nothing else makes sense to explain his behavior. The only thing I can think of as a reason is if he expects to sue the previous directors by claiming that they sold him a broken company that couldn't survive.

For that to make sense though, he must not realize he's doing it all in public and we can see it.

Mysteries of the rich and their assholery, I guess.

Nvidia RTX 4090: So hot they're melting power cables

Can I just say

"assemblies have demonstrated thermal variance,"

Is a top-notch way to say "caught fire"

Millennials, Gen Z actually suck at workplace security

Re: Meh

"Possibly a difference between some of us whose first meeting with a computer was a terminal at university"

Terminal?

029 (when you weren't stuck with an 026)

Open-source leaders' reputations as jerks is undeserved

Re: Offensive and poorlt thought through

"Putting people in the right shaped hole is the key to success. Forcing them into a wrong shaped hole is utterly disastrous for everyone. As this tale perfectly shows."

And as metrics-based management will never understand.

Linux luminaries discuss efforts to bring Rust to the kernel

Re: All of that effort

"If you don't like it, go back to C, because its going to be a while before they let you write Perl in the kernel. ;)"

systemd-cpan

Don't say Pentium or Celeron anymore, it's just Processor now, says Intel

Re: “It’s got an Intel Processor”

"Darn it! There goes my bet that it'd be called the Intel Sexolicious Bootytron."

That does sound like a great EDM band name.

Lenovo launches face-mounted monitor

I think I like it, but ...

Probably dumb question, but how do you see the keyboard to type, if you're using a laptop? Presumably you could make it semi-transparent for an on-screen keyboard in a touch environment, but I'm not certain you want that much transparency for general use.

Nice to see this old idea implemented, though, and I'll be interested to see if it works out.

Linux may soon lose support for the DECnet protocol

" Why I do it this way is left as an exercise for the reader. "

You are Ned Ludd and I claim my 5 pounds.

Last week Intel killed Optane. Today, Kioxia and Everspin announced comparable tech

Re: Changing everything, or not

" this should be great but it requires a whole new operating system design."

Multics did it 50 years ago. It's a different way of looking at things, but very workable.

Multics and an emulator to run it are freely available, for anyone interested:

https://multics-wiki.swenson.org/index.php/Main_Page

Russian ChessBot breaks child opponent's finger

Let the Wookie win.

America's chip land has another potential shortage: Electronics engineers

Re: EEeek! vs CSfreak: Et tu ISA?

"Here I learned to wonder if said EE uglyness could be out marketed by ANYONE with a sense of orthogonal design in order to lower the suicide threshold of poor assembler coders, like me."

Tip a glass for our late, lamented, friend the PDP-11.

Linus Torvalds says Rust is coming to the Linux kernel 'real soon now'

Re: People

"People don't understand the VM subsystem, even when it's written in C,"...

Then you need new people.

---

Or a new VM subsystem. Overcommitment is an abomination whose only purpose is to allow bad code to run (for a while, anyway).

First steps into the world of thought leadership: What could go wrong?

Re: I Used To Hate That!

"CV: I'm really good working with others."

"Interview: According to your record (created by us), you are a sociopath"

"With others, on others, whatever works."

"Have you considered a move to management?"

1 percent inspiration, 99 percent plagiarism – that's my motto.

Thats gold, Jerry! Gold!

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

Time to skate away from this thread.

Re: Digital transmission?

"to be fair: my re-release of some Yehudi Menhuin playing the Bach Partitas sounds... well... not that great either."

Well, of course. To my ears, all violin partitas are the elevator music of a particularly noxious Hell.

And the elevator gets stuck between floors.

I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems all too well

Re: Computing smarts in the cloud

"And you think the hardware manufacturers will be OK with this?"

What are they going to do about it? Sell Linux computers?

Elon Musk orders Tesla execs back to the office

Re: Prediction

"Am I right?"

Well, maybe, other than the part about 'regrets' and 'learned'. I really don't think those things are happening.

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Damn. I wish I had ever worked for her.

Version 251 of systemd coming soon to a Linux distro near you

Re: Software Junk

Oh, lots of IT-related companies offer excellent customer service. Just remember that you aren't the customer.

New audio server Pipewire coming to next version of Ubuntu

"Like the article says, if you don't have any sound daemon then you can only play one thing at a time. Anything else that tries to play audio will get an error when it tries to open the sound device if something else is currently playing, which is not what most users expect."

And yet, I have pulseaudio and pipewire both on my "taboo - never install" blacklist (OpenSuse Leap), and have no problem listening to a music stream while watching 2 simultaneous videos, each with their own volume control, working perfectly. Maybe I'm holding it wrong..

The Return of Gopher: Pre-web hypertext service is still around

Re: The original Internet can still be found in remote corners

Thanks. You just cost me an hour and a half -- to start.

The internet has been useful today.

(No really, thanks!)

The time you solved that months-long problem in 3 seconds

Re: Fuck that

Most people are pretty useless anyway.

To be fair, so is most software, and a lot of hardware.

Microsoft Visual Studio: Cluttering up developer disks for 25 years

Re: Happy Days

"VS Code is a bit fragile with some of the plugins, particularly for git under Linux, but it has a decent number of addons to handle syntax highlighting, editing, and good enough vim emulation."

You know what else has decent syntax highlighting, editing, and a pretty good vim emulation?

Vim.

Fujitsu: Dumping older workers will wipe out quarter of forecast profit

Re: As part of its human resources initiatives to strengthen its status as a DX company

"HR departments being of course notorious for their young, dynamic, innovative and transformative nature, and not at all stuffed full of unimaginative dullards who can't scratch their own arse without first having consulted the company policy on arse-scratching."

I think you mean there, "...without holding internal meetings with "senior leadership" for a year and a half to create a company policy on arse-scratching."

And then not telling anyone about it.

BOFH: The Geek's Countergambit – outwitted at an electronics store

Re: Got complacent there

"Bit complacent of Simon to not check the seal and content before leaving the store. "

I wonder if he was distracted by Catherine. I'm interested to see how that works out.

50 lines of Bash to bring a Wordle fan out of their shell

Re: Quit vim

Use Emacs instead:

Ctrl-C,Meta-Bucky-M, "(close-this-buffer-and-the-other-buffers-and-exit-while-saving-probably)"

Not only simple, but totally intuitive!