* Posts by Julz

944 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Oct 2009

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Oracle adds GenAI to Fusion with a whopping 50 use cases

Julz

Just

So.

Cryptocurrency laundryman gets hung out to dry

Julz

Just

That.

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

Julz

Re: Maths

Or 3/4's of a tractor, for lovers of Soviet statistics.

Julz

Re: Repeat after me:

Hun, Sun Ray?

Julz

Re: Repeat after me:

Lotus notes was a database with various functionality like email attached.

Ruggedized phone group takes the Bullitt, calls in PWC as administrative receiver

Julz

Software

Is just like any other goods or service and should be treated as such. If they do not work as described, then they are not fit for purpose. The consumer Rights Act 2015 and the amended Sale Of Goods Act 1979 are quiet clear on that. Well, in the UK at least. Other jurisdictions may vary.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15/notes/division/3/1/4

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/faulty-goods-digital-content-services/

Ahead of Super Tuesday, US elections face existential and homegrown threats

Julz

Train crashes are BIGGER...

FAA gives SpaceX a bunch of homework to do before Starship flies again

Julz

Even

The first train journeys were dangerous too.

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/2011/may/06/newspapers-national-newspapers2?CMP=twt_gu

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

Julz

Just

Make them reflective on one side and black on the other. Let the Sun do the work.

US military pulls the trigger, uses AI to target air strikes

Julz

The

"I imagine they're also trying to use AI to generate patterns from the data that hadn't previously been thought of. I'd be scepitical, but you never know."

One thing that current AI is good at is pattern matching; finding stuff that us meat bags are too bored to find.

City council megaproject to spend millions for manual work Oracle system was meant to do

Julz

Re: I live there unfortunatley

I think that if a council area is run into bankruptcy (section 114 notice), then all the responsible elected officers should be bared from office and the whole council should be put up for re-election. Letting the same bunch of councilors that caused the issue (or at least didn't deal with previous issues) try to fix them seems ludicrous.

Julz

As

Part of the 'special circumstances' that rule was waved.

Julz

And

We should go with the German for their offices; Rathaus.

FAA gives Boeing 90 days to fix serious safety shortcomings found in report

Julz

Waiting

In the wings (sic); Comac?

Julz

Hey

Get on the programe. That's the way software's been manufactured for decades.

New solvent might end winter charging blues for EV owners

Julz

Doesn't

Look too good on first Google...

https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Fluoroacetonitrile

It is a bird, a plane or a Chinese spy balloon? None of the above

Julz

Re: China insisted was an errant weather balloon

And/or adaptive optics.

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

Julz

Re: Well

It's not the public that make the decisions on which CPU architecture to use, which language is better for which task, which development environment to use, whether to develop and support your own code or trust some crap off the internet, which OS brings the best blend of features and risks or any other of these types of system decisions. The public are innocent bystanders in a drive by shooting.

We choose the gun (and the car) and it's usually the cheapest the company can get away with.

Julz

Re: In the absence of files...

Take your pick on abstraction. VME had libraries where each library only contained one type of thing, usually some sort of file but it could be other sorts of objects. The library contained the information the OS needed to do things with that sort of object. Oh, and all of the access controls etc. No one bothered where they actually were stored (they certainly weren't all in the same physical location, or even logical location) unless you were like me and tasked with performance.

Julz

Well

It could have been worse. You might have majored in Javascript. Python is just wrong, C is a horrible set of compromises, and dBase?

You mention cost a lot. I would posit that the cost of using inappropriate languages and systems is far higher than that of the odd training course (do they still exist?) and a bit of time to get you head around some syntax or concept. Look around at the mess that is the current insecure, bloated, bug ridden, untested, etc. etc. set of systems we have to use. All built on top of built to the lowest cost hardware. The risk and the real cost have been passes on to us, the users. It's our data that gets stolen, it's our photographs that get 'lost', it's our time that gets wasted, it's our infrastructure that gets hacked, it's our cars that won't work without an internet connection, it's...

What we have now is so so much less than it might have been if the cost of making the poor decisions had been truly taken into account and not just the profit of whichever tech company was selling it's wares.

/end rant

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

Julz

Hey

What about us Competent/Inactive managers?

Julz

Make

That 99.9% of the time...

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

Julz

Just

How much green goo do you need?

FTC asks normal folks if they'd like AI impersonation scam protection, too

Julz

Re: It

But if its oh so similar and you haven't payed for a license...

Julz

It

Doesn't have to be a scam. What about voice overs. Is that's what his name, that nice chap from Dr Who telling me I'm fourteenth in the queue for the GP's receptionist to tell me there are no appointments today? Perhaps not...

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

Julz

Putting

Reactors into space isn't new, its been going on for ages. Not the first but probably the longest lived of the Soviet/Russian nuclear powers satellite types:

https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/us-a.htm

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

Julz

Re: The *three* things that make a microkernel.

ICLs Goldrush used a chorus system microkernel with a special high speed IPC system that was implemented in both software and hardware. Basically cut out any (well most) buffer copying. This meant that calls coming and going across the user land/system land boundary were not copied (fancy memory protection hardware) and between node IPC (fancy low latency network hardware) calls were addressed as if local. Goldrush was a true UNIX implementing a version of SVR4. Seems to be forgotten now.

Feds dismantle Russian GRU botnet built on 1,000-plus home, small biz routers

Julz

Who else is hiding in broadband gateways?

NSA, GCHQ...

Apple makes it official: No Home Screen web apps in European Union

Julz

I

Don't see any reason Apple or any other company has to provide one feature or another with it's operating system.

Now this withdrawal of a previously available feature may piss off people that use it but this is hardly the first time OS providers (and others like network and service providers) have done that. It may seem to be high handed and petulant, given it's geo location boundaries and its introduction due to a piece of national (well, super national) legislation but it's hardly the only differences in OS provision due to national location. This is an inevitable result of nations passing different and varied laws within their jurisdictions. Features and services provided by OS are there by the will of the provider. If they decide that feature X or Y is either no longer necessary or too much hassle or too expensive or whatever, then it would seem to me that they are in no way obliged to keep it. If that decision ends up being detrimental to the company, then it probably was a bad decision. Companies make bad decisions all the time.

There are times when things such as anti-trust laws may muddy the waters and in the way that US law enforcers seem to think their laws apply everywhere but this case seems straight forward. The EU passed a law demanding that if Apple provided OS feature X within it's jurisdiction, then it had to be available to other OS users and not just internal Apple developers. Apple has looked at this and decided that the best (easiest, cheapest, best, most secure... take your pick) way of complying with this law so that it can still provide it's products within this jurisdiction, was to just not provide the feature within the EU. A perfectly good way of complying with the law if likely to piss off to those who use the feature within the EU.

Companies are amoral beasts. I doubt there is anything more that self interest and money behind this decision.

Polish train maker denies claims its software bricked rolling stock maintained by competitor

Julz

After

Reading the BadCyber article, this would appear to be rather more serious than 'just' not allowing third party maintenance. The trains would seem to have been sabotaged knowingly by the manufacturer. Surely this is a criminal mater.

Australia building 'top secret' cloud to catch up and link with US, UK intel orgs

Julz

Re: Warping the English Language

"just plain data." - embarrassing if used in the wrong way.

"intelligence data" - very embarrassing if used in the wrong way.

What's the golden age of online services? Well, now doesn't suck

Julz

I

Miss Gopher...

Six pack of sub-Neptune exoplanets hang tight around nearby star

Julz

Re: How do they know that ...

A guess…

AI threatens to automate away the clergy

Julz

Re: Top thirteen

AI been there and done that. Move along, automated trading going on here, nothing to see…

That time a JPL engineer almost killed a Mars Rover before it left Earth

Julz

Just

Why. Why was the test rig bespoke and not part of the normal processes and built with the rest of the trundle bot?

Car dealers openly beg Biden to put brakes on electric vehicle drive

Julz

Re: Cars dealer in America?

Sell direct…

Double Moon crater riddle solved? Spent Chinese rocket booster carrying mystery payload crash landed

Julz

The

Extra weight was probably lots of struts.

Airbus to test sat-stabilizing 'Detumbler' to simplify astro-garbage disposal

Julz

Re: I have two thoughts

Oh no, not again...

NASA geeks code new tricks to model rocket plumes and avoid a lunar dust-up

Julz

Re: Supersonic hot gas not that awesome for rocky, dusty surface?????

Space isn't. No ones going to hear you scream but pressure waves do propagate in the thin stuff that makes up what we puny humans call the vacuum of space.

So what is the speed of sound in space. It varies depending upon the density of space but is approx 10-100 Km per second. The exhaust gasses coming out of a liquid fueled rocket nozzle have a speed of about 4.5 Km per second. So, not supersonic with reference to moons (lack of) atmosphere.

Want a Cybertruck? You're stuck with it for a year, says Tesla

Julz

Re: J. Jonah Jameson laugh.gif

Always found a Morris Minor Traveler good for that sort of stuff.

Julz

Re: J. Jonah Jameson laugh.gif

History shows us the solution. Most stay put, farm and attempt to defend their wealth. Others travel around and steel the wealth from those who stay put. There are also the fringe bands that travel to stay close to moving resources such as migrating animals. In time those that raided tend to join in with the subset of the stay-putters that defended the farms and offer to 'protect' the farming communities from their neighbors. Thus are kings and nations born. The nomads never get a look in. Best not to have an apocalypse as none of it sounds fun.

Adobe sells fake AI-generated Israel-Hamas war images – then the news ran them as real

Julz
Joke

What

You need is blockchain

US actors are still on strike – and yup, it's about those looming AI clones

Julz

Re: Resistance is useless

Or the cast is dead…

Open source work makes me appreciate software testing. It's not an academic exercise

Julz

1970's

Calling. Testing is important; no shit Sherlock.

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Julz

Re: When will this crap stop

In a nutshell.

The alternative to stopping climate change is untested carbon capture tech

Julz

Re: Carbon capture at home?

Yes, have less/no kids.

CERN experiment proves gravity pulls antimatter the way Einstein predicted

Julz

Re: Dark Matter? Anti-Matter?

If there was a load of anti-mater in the universe we would certainly be able to 'see' as it interacts with normal mater quiet well. Dark mater on the other hand, if is actually exists, keeps itself to itself as far as interacting with the stuff we can see. Oh, and by the way, we can 'see' quiet a long way, almost back to when the first stars were forming.

p.s. As for an equal amount of mater and anti-mater at the beginning, still just a theory. There is some wiggle room with the CERN experiment which might yet show that anti-mater behaves differently than mater in some crucial way which might account for it's lack of existence in the universe we observe. Perhaps it might go some way to explain why less anti-mater than matter formed during the big bang leaving the mater we can see. Or, perhaps we are just wrong about the big bang and all that.

Israel and Italy have cheapest mobile data out of 237 countries

Julz

Re: US <-> Germany mobile prices reflect ACTUAL $ value

You might like to research the oil euro related 'cause' for the second gulf war, a persistent theory despite attempts to debunk it.

DARPA takes its long-duration Manta undersea drone for a test-dip

Julz

Re: Really?

Those few surfacing events are the killer, especially for the UAV.

Why can't datacenter operators stop thinking about atomic power?

Julz

Since

This is meant to be a UK based publication, other SMRs exist:

https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactors.aspx#/

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