* Posts by Arthur the cat

3356 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2009

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: "Stop putting cabling in easy to reach, easy to breach ducting"

Seems to me it would have been so easy to bury a conduit and feed the fibre through it.

"Cabling on the consumer premises is the responsibility of the consumer." I know various people who've ended up with the cable draped across their front lawn.

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

Arthur the cat Silver badge
Happy

Re: "They have that kind of money"

Given the choice, what would you buy? A grey box with blinkenlights or a Ferrari?

Blinkenlights every time. Yes, I'm a nerd. So?

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Real Time

Not real-time communication in computing terms

This means a 45-hour wait to see what a given command might have done.

That's a lot faster than getting an appointment with a GP these days.

Exchange Online blocked from sending email to AOL and Yahoo

Arthur the cat Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Alternatively, perhaps just pick up the phone and have a chat

I told them I would buy them lunch if they could identify it's use without looking it up.

As remarked elsewhere, once upon a time you had to explain what a video cassette was to old people, now you have to explain them to young people.

'Chemical cat' on the loose in Japanese city

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Catzilla

Well, I suppose at least they will end up with something to go against Godzilla

Yes, but after the cat wins it'll push all the skyscrapers off into the bay.

Arthur the cat Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Looks like Curiosity did it again

Have you tried retaliating in the cat owner's garden?

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

Arthur the cat Silver badge

On the other hand, an AI evolved from sendmail cfg is just going to sit in a corner hugging itself and occasionally screaming

Personally I'd expect it to be more like AM in I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. Vengeance would be its only priority.

Chrome users – get an alert when extensions are in danger of falling into wrong hands

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Money Money Money

All Google cares about is Money, nothing else matters to them.

But companies that don't make money don't last lo…

[Looks at AI companies and others kept afloat without profits for years by vast VC input.]

No, forget I said that.

World-plus-dog booted out of Facebook, Instagram, Threads

Arthur the cat Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Food for thought

There's a risk that people will starve to death without the motivation to put a picture of their food on Instagram.

It's a well known scientific fact that food has no calories unless photographed and put on social media.

Chinese 'connected' cars are a national security threat, says Biden

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Who Is Listening In To Cars Phoning Home???......

Thank goodness for my lovely Morris 1000 Traveller!!!

Or as Edna Everage so wonderfully described it, a half-timbered car.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

Arthur the cat Silver badge
Joke

After 2038, assuming the human race is still around, we'll need to cope with the fact 2100 ISN'T a leap year...

I would hope by then we have the technology to ensure that it will be. What else is the International Earth Rotation Service for? (Get pedalling!)

New solvent might end winter charging blues for EV owners

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: A new solvent.

As a quondam chemist, I wouldn't go near it with a very long barge pole, in a hazmat suit. But maybe I'm just a bit paranoid.

Paranoid? Maybe, but your life insurance should be a lot cheaper.

Willy Wonka event leaves bitter taste with artificially sweetened promises

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Tried LLM yesterday for the first time

The only practical use-case I have found for it so far is generating large amounts of generic text in roughly the right size and shape for test data.

Ipsum lorem generators probably take less energy.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: And so it begins????

Or for us old farts: The End

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: FANTASY

I think that should have been DON'T Google it!

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Catgacating

Isn't that a film about a society where all cats are genetically graded?

Odysseus probe moonwalking on the edge of battery life after landing on its side

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Time to call Sigourney?

Weaponized tardigrades anybody?

Varda capsule proves you don't need astronauts for gravity-defying science

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re-entry licence?

The eight-month mission duration was twice that initially planned due to problems with the license needed for re-entry.

What? You need separate licences for going up and coming down? If you're intending to return your spacecraft to Earth I'd have thought a return ticketlicence would have made sense.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Arthur the cat Silver badge

There are the managers who's profession ( I use the word very loosely) is managing. They often believe that, as one management consultant said to me "You don't need to know anything about the business to be a manager of it". And they often have MBAs and no or little or no experience of the front line roles.

That's a bit verbose. "They have MBAs" is probably sufficient. I've literally never met a manager who tells(*) you he's(**) got an MBA who is anything other than negative capacity.

(*) It could be I've had decent managers with MBAs, but if so they've kept it quiet. If they tell you the first time you meet that they've got an MBA, they're an arsehole and will be an awful manager and totally ignorant of anything technical.

(**) It's always a bloke who insists you must know about his MBA. (And his Rolex. And his BMW.)

Crowning glory of GOV.UK websites updated, sparking frontend upgrades

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Royal Cypher

That's a phrase that can be interpreted in several different ways:

noun: Cypher

2 dated

a person of no importance, especially one who does the bidding of others and seems to have no will of their own.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

If you don't like the way society is going, it's all on github - you can just fork it.

Yes please.

ChatGPT starts spouting nonsense in 'unexpected responses' shocker

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Just as far away as before

"Mark I humans" get PTSD and even sometimes defect, when ask to do unspeakably evil things like massacre innocent children.

Looks at current world events.

Raises eyebrows.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: He went on to state that...

Never mind AI, that's the state of our entire fucking industry in one sentence right there.

Never mind AI, that's the state of our entire fucking reality in one sentence right there.

T,FTFY.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Just as far away as before

Automated genocide-machines with guns that automatically hunt and shoot at whoever are classified as the wrong sort of human, have been worryingly feasible for several years now.

Call me cynical if you like, but why would anybody fork out good money for such hardware when Mark I humans produced by unskilled labour have been doing that very effectively for centuries?

Space nukes: The unbelievably bad idea that's exactly that ... unbelievable

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: That was my thought, too.

Next on the agenda: Be sure to check under your beds for reds.

More immediate problem in many countries: check in your bed for bugs (the bloodsucking kind).

Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

Arthur the cat Silver badge
Angel

Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ

Every day I wish for the sweet release of death to come and cover me whenever I have to deal with some dickhead user

Might I suggest wishing for the sweet release of death to cover the user?

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: One thing that has/should change is...

Files and folders are how computers work

Files and directories are how computers work

T,FTFY.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Idiots

Is there another form of Enshittification you're trying to differentiate it from?

Cory Doctorow talks specifically about enshittification of companies' offerings to customers. There's also the enshittification of governments and public discourse and food (hybrid rice/meat with added fish gelatin anybody?) and …

I wonder which university will be the first to open a Department of Enshittification Studies?

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Idiots

to quote Cory Doctorow "The 'Enshittification' of the service as a rule!

I suggest from now on we simply speak of Doctorovian Enshittification as a standard recognised phenomenon.

NASA solar sail tech is ready – now who's up to use it in a mission?

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Next up….

NASA announce their first spindizzy drive.

And then people near where Elon Musk is living feel the ground shaking.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Nuclear

I personally think nuclear propulsion would be much more suitable for missions (especially manned ones) in the Solar System. Solar sails are only suitable for long duration missions which aren't time sensitive.

For most missions the target will still be there in 10 or 100 or a million years. Apart from Pluto crossing the line where its atmosphere condenses/sublimes and the obvious "oh shit, it's going to hit us, better move it" events I can't think of stuff that's seriously time sensitive. So long as some results come back within a researcher's lifetime so there's motivation, a few extra years don't really matter.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Do Electric Sheep Dream of Androids?

Do Light Sails work in the dark?

Don't be silly, you'd need a Dark Sail.

Microsoft might have just pulled support for very old PCs in Windows 11 24H2

Arthur the cat Silver badge
Trollface

Re: POPCNT

I like the idea of a signed pop count. The sign bit counts as -1 so all ones popcnts as 30 or 62.

HPE seeks $4B in damages from Autonomy boss Mike Lynch and his ex-CFO

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Mandy Rice-Davies Applies

Mandy Rice Davies always applies.

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Remember 'The Last One'?

I strongly disagree with his take.

Ditto. I learnt to program 52 years ago. For most of those 52 years there's been someone, somewhere predicting the end of programming "because it will all be done by machines, you'll just tell them what you want done". I suspect this will still be happening long after I've been recycled.

Google silences Bard, restrings it as Gemini with optional $20-a-month upgrade

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Image generation

Many tech news outlets a few days ago: Bard can now generate images!

Small print in Google announcement: Except in the EEA, Switzerland and UK.

Europe's deepest mine to become Europe's deepest battery

Arthur the cat Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Stick a pipe full of water down the shaft and GENERATE electricity

Betteridge was an optimist.

CERN is training robot dogs to spot radiation hazards at Large Hadron Collider

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Fetch!

It would be so much easier if you could just train these to fetch the Higgs boson, or whatever they wanted that day.

Good boy! Drop! Drop!! Oh for heaven's sake, it's just buried the top quark in the flower bed!

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

Arthur the cat Silver badge

the grand total is less than the impact to the UK of having Liz Truss do a single budget...

Yep. The LHC has been working for 14 years and never produced a black hole but Truss punched one in the British economy in only 7 weeks.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Collide at insane speeds

what are we going to call it once it's built? It won't be the Future Collider...

The Fucking Colossal Collider. It keeps the acronym that will be blazoned on everything.

Google throws $1M at Rust Foundation to build C++ bridges

Arthur the cat Silver badge

There is a shit load of legacy code

Rust will need to integrate and interface with this existing code

I known it's not what you meant, but I got a mental image of making Rust work with COBOL.

[Shudder]

Space exploitation vs space exploration: Humanity has much to learn from the Voyager probes

Arthur the cat Silver badge

The word 'Electricity' was coined by a contemporary of Shakespeare.

And the word electricity comes from ἤλεκτρον, the Greek for amber. The Greeks knew about static electricity and played around with its effects over 2 millennia ago.

Arthur the cat Silver badge
Happy

Re: Timescales

(Yeah, right. We are the proles of 1984 -- it won't change until we rise up, and we can't rise unless things change.)

But if you read the appendices of 1984 there's an implication that the proles did rise up and smash the system. Never give up hope.

Zen Internet warns customers of an impending IP address change

Arthur the cat Silver badge

We've been with Zen for 15 years or so, but not had anything from them about this change

I've just been forcibly upgraded from copper to CityFibre by Zen (Thursday last week). I thought I might be losing my /29 which I've had since 2002 but that transferred without a problem, as did my /48 IPv6.Technically the switch was utterly painless, and as they initiated the upgrade I'm supposed to only be paying the same as my old FTTC link (£19.50/month rather than the full cost which I think is £35/month).

However, they've totally bogged up the billing. As they started it I shouldn't have to be paying an extra penny, but they're trying to get me to pay £2200(*) for the upgrade! There is a support case open on this but they're being very slow to respond. (I wonder why?)

(*) They've managed to enter my annual fee as a monthly one and are treating the upgrade as if I requested it.

Elon Musk's brain-computer interface outfit Neuralink tests its tech on a human

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Hmmm

I seem to remember my old professor Warrick at Reading experimenting with this years ago. I'll have to have a Google and see what came of it. ISTR that he planted an interface in his brain so this might not be the first as claimed by Mr X.

He had an RFID chip (or similar) stuck in his arm IIRC. He'd have never got permission from the ethics committee to do a brain implant, not even in his own. He just bullshitted a lot.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

If I was a quadriplegic, having seen those videos of monkeys playing pong with their freaking minds, I'd say "Sign me up"!

I'd ask how long the monkeys lived after being wired up first.

Things are going to get weird as the nanometer era draws to a close

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Weird is as weird does

Ooh look, amanfrommars has brought a friend.

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: wasn't used for an existing country

There are 43 ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes reserved for users:

aa, oo, qm-qz, xa-xz & zz

These can all be used for whatever you like within your own systems. You don't need to risk using ones like .yu

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

Arthur the cat Silver badge
Joke

Knowing how to make tea properly …

… involves a steep learning curve.

Macy's and Sunglass Hut sued for $10M over face-recog arrest and 'sexual assault'

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: scary

won't be long before the police will just routinely run cctv through their stores of information from passports and licenses and just apprehend people

If you think that's bad, how about using DNA to predict a face and then using facial recognition on the predicted face. Utter insanity.