Posts by Notas Badoff

Developer battled to write his own documentation, but lost the boss fight

"get rid of the duck”

Can't find the original story, but here's a paraphase: "get rid of the duck"

Ubuntu 25.10's Rusty sudo holes quickly welded shut

^#%@

Prose or porn: the difference is not in the language, it is in how the language is used.

MS Task Manager turns 30: Creator reveals how a 'very Unixy impulse' endured in Windows

And here I am, watching 108% system idle pop up in Task Manager again and again (Win11). Or is that because I'm reading ElReg and PC is thus "extra idle"?

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

Re: If only there was an alternative OS

So, in some ways Plummer is saying to Microsoft "Hey you kids, get off my OS!"

Then again, he might be saying something different to us, using exactly the same words?

AWS outage exposes Achilles heel: central control plane

Re: This isn't com[lexity.

Still tickled by an old posting...

Abend's Observation: "Many cloud systems are actually just distributed single points of failure"

And here the distributed single point of failure that all were referencing was AWS?

Intern had no idea what not to do, so nearly mangled a mainframe

Re: Angle Park

This is the book I loan out to anyone "interested in computers". If it was meant to be, they *will* be enthused. If not, firm "don't go there".

But... I also tell everyone to think about the ending. Every one working in that basement to make the project the great success it was, had to leave the company afterwards.

We are wandering jongleurs, singing our songs for our own reasons.

AT&T not sure if new customer data dump is déjà vu

Wilde

“To lose one record, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose 183 million looks like carelessness.”

Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos

Re: Wish I knew what kind....

I do wish someone would put together a decision tree map for keyboard buyers. Because there really are too many variations to consider and right now everyone is selling for Gaming!1!! Everytime I dip into the ads and articles about keyboards I'm appalled at seeing yet another new frabjets feature, like magnetic actuation. I just want to type, not slash and zoom.

We call this kernel saunters: How Apple rearranged its XNU core with exclaves

Mi exclave es tu enclave

An exclave, with a similarly tortured history: Büsingen.

Hey programmers – is AI making us dumber?

Forgetting the old references?

Having read all the comments, I'm surprised that no one linked to XKCD comic "Writing skills". That would've been a good start for a discussion.

Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel code, says its rise is inevitable

"Adding another language really shouldn't be a problem."

Please pardon my derailing your thread, but I'm bothered by something not mentioned in any of these "It's war!" articles.

Um, what other languages are used inside Linux. Aren't there just C and C++ ? And a smattering of assembler? And C++ is still being digested?

Unless there were some large multiple of two languages _already_ being used in Linux, a statement like the above title just gives me instant heartburn.

Yeah, right, boss, anything you say! (calcium pills gonna be a rare earth 'round here!)

White House attempts to 'explain' mystery drone sightings: The FAA authorized 'em

"directly from the President"

Trump says coronavirus will ‘miraculously’ be gone by April ‘once the weather warms up’

During the campaigning, when Trump would claim he'd reduce food prices, why didn't people just point at his steady grasp of reality the last time around.

Microsoft admits January's Windows Update broke USB Digital to Audio Convertor

Skreeeeee

Microsoft update: like nails on a chalkboard, forever

Megan, AI recruiting agent, is on the job, giving bosses fewer reasons to hire in HR

"and update the notes so that the team has it before the meeting."

3am text: Hi! This is Megan with Tenagra. We were wondering if you have Tuesday nights free? Tuesday night is our company karaoke night. Everybody here loves it! Can you just drop us a note about your availability on Tuesday nights, before our 7:30am stage two intermediate candidate maybes meeting this morning? Thx

NATO's newest member comes out swinging following latest Baltic Sea cable attack

Re: Kaliningrad

Please allow for people feeling negative about starting yet another war just for your amusement.

I made this network so resilient nothing could possibly go wro...

Re: Every network admin has done this

“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”

― Otto von Bismarck

Eric Schmidt: Build more AI datacenters, we aren't going to 'hit climate goals anyway'

Re: Drinking the Kool-Aid

As if an AI trained on Dickens could solve London smog....

Mozilla Thunderbird finally gets system tray notifications

Use any key, but not this one, nor that one, nor...

We have 'progressed' from the days when MSIE was the fiat "must use", to now when we sometimes have to say "don't use" one or another browser, because of persistent bugs or features lag behind the others.

This is not the advance we were hoping for.

Google to kill off URL shortener once and for all

Re: Google maps forever! (?)

Aiieee! You scared me silly about this. Even after checking a bit I don't know that I'm not nervous.

I just generated such a URL from Google maps and it looks like

https://maps.app.goo.gl/YBAJQeF5....

so indeed does have goo.gl in the URL

But it also has "maps.app." in the hostname, so not strictly the shortened URL format?

Then found in Google's notice that they explicitly say:

"Any developers using links built with the Google URL Shortener in the form https://goo.gl/* will be impacted, and these URLs will no longer return a response after August 25th, 2025."

So (whew!) Google maps derived links will continue to work. Well, until....

Google Translate now fluent in 110 additional languages from Abkhaz to Zulu

Re: Quality of translation may vary

Google translate has a great number of wince-inducing goofs, in likely every language.

Try "sigue tratando"... that comes up as "keep triying". Let's call it more correct than not?

Then there's 香, which is the first character of "Hong Kong". Is the resulting "sweet-smelting" the result of offering perfumed virgins to the forges?

I suppose the hope here is that AI will be *more* accurate at copying, rather than how Google started by ripping off badly done copied texts?

UniSuper Google Cloud outage caused by an unfortunate series of events

Re: Someone else's - Abend's Observation

I really liked commenter Abend0c4's observation:

"Many cloud systems are actually just distributed single points of failure"

Kaspersky hits back at claims its AI helped Russia develop military drone systems

Dual-use: your work used against you

Have a great idea for a beneficial invention? Stop! Prehensile you may actually be pre-heinous! In the wrong hands your aid to mankind could will be turned to destruction.

Hmm, might this be a good party game? Challenge everyone to come up with a 'good' thing that isn't a 'bad' thing some how some way.

"Vaccines" "Whoa! Vaccines are mind control devices! And that's without anything being wrong with them! Just how they're used by the conspiracy theorists."

Make it an alphabet game? Axes, balloons, concrete, drugs, email, ...

SharePoint logs are easily circumvented and Microsoft is dragging its heels

When developers stayed up longer than the software

Looong time ago, a bug report noted that a famous database product had timers that would overflow at around 4 days uptime. And then crash the database. And Microsoft closed the report with "not a problem, working as designed". At the time, between the prevailing uptime spans of the database and underlying OS, staying up for 4 days was only a 'theoretical' possibility. So the database people shrugged it off.

US government excoriates Microsoft for 'avoidable errors' but keeps paying for its products

Re: If planes were built like “software”

Software's more like: "We said it can fly over mountains. We didn't say it could fly over that mountain."

Fujitsu to shutter operations in Republic of Ireland

Not us! That other group did it!

"There is a sentiment within teams that 'someone had to pay for the UK's Post Office farce.'"

Um, so was it Fujitsu Ireland handling that project?

Out with the old, in with the new as 100 Starlink satellites take atmospheric exit

When the counter overflows the satellite reverses course?

"after identifying an issue that could cause them to malfunction and become unresponsive to ground control."

Gotta be a counter overflowing. Or a clock. But after only five years?

Snow day in corporate world thanks to another frustrating Microsoft Teams outage

Abend's Observation - your on the way to eponymous famous

"Many cloud systems are actually just distributed single points of failure"

Microsoft admits issues with Windows 10 patch almost 2 months after release

Software Company Point Of No Return

Is there a variation of that, where they are talking about the *company* ?

As in, "Any attempt to fix Microsoft just creates worse problems?"

That would in fact explain so many of Microsoft's product problems.

IBM overhauls rewards program for staff inventions, wipes away cash points

Re: It's the IBM of the 21st century, what do you expect?

Well at least IBM are *explicitly* deprecating both innovation and employees "to remove all doubt" as the saying goes.

Do 'Ratners' have fractional measures? As in, "this is a one-quarter Ratner" ?

Broadcom to end VMware’s channel program, move partners to its own invite-only offering

Broadcom tells partners "Go fu*k yourself!"

Look's like they've musked up their buyout

Tiny bits of space junk reveal their wherabouts when they collide, boffins hope

Does this 'blip' make me look full of junk?

It would seem some equivalent of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle would apply.

Somethings met and there was a 'blip'. You don't know how big they were (and are now) because the energy released would be partly determined by incidence angle. You don't know where they came from because you weren't measuring before the 'blip'. You can't measure where they then go because you still can't see them.

Sounds like all you'll get are frequency statistics - how many 'blips' per unit time per unit volume.

Hmm, might as well put up a STOP sign, wait for a bit, and count the holes.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Reverse Autonomy?

(Didn't see this above)

Someone pays a premium to acquire Twitter/X from M,Elon.

Control Altman delete: OpenAI fires CEO, chairman quits

Re: Scandalous revelations coming out in 3...2...1

Is this the article and research about 'revelation' 4 ?

* Google researchers deal a major blow to the theory AI is about to outsmart humans (at businessinsider.com)

* Pretraining Data Mixtures Enable Narrow Model Selection Capabilities in Transformer Models (at Arxiv)

It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

Re: Consent

Not physically connected, rather bluetooth pairing for notifications, which show bits of text and who messages/calls are from. Which we thought was a benign service offering.

After injecting pop-up ads for Bing into Windows, Microsoft now bends to Europe on links

"can we" vs. "should we"

As perhaps a better comment on Microsoft's executive capabilities: "ill-advised"

Arc: A radical fresh take on the web browser

Myopia + hyperopia = dystopia

Ah me. Author waxes on about how they were able to use extensions with Firefox to gain their preferred appearance, showing how extendibility is a good thing. Then forgets to mention whether this new browser has any such thing. (sigh)

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

You will not go to success today

Someone must have said this before, but is Elon handling Twitter proving that software is much harder than rocket science?

Amazon Prime too easy to join, too hard to quit, says FTC lawsuit

Re: Poetic Justice?

Counting down to someone mentioning a horse . . .

Smartphone recovery that's always around the corner is around the corner

Looking back (nothing to look forward to)

My S8 is dying, but so have my hopes for a decent new phone. Thinking about it last night, replaceable batteries are gone, expandable memories are gone, earphone plugs are gone, etc. etc.

Are they really thinking I'll spend BUCKs just to get a new battery? Cuz that's all the 'good' they're offering _me_.

Large language models' surprise emergent behavior written off as 'a mirage'

Not yet, anyway

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

.

Arthur Conan Doyle, after writing so much apparently intelligent text, asserted fairies were real. Willingly fooled by children. I can't think of a better cautionary tale. Can you?

Ubuntu 23.04 welcomes three more flavors, but hamburger menus leave a bad taste

It's a nature conservation area (for crickets)

Google news recently re-did their home page. With 80 pixels of blank dead space on the left side. No reason for that. It never contains anything but dead space.

I look at that and wonder - which of several negative conclusions about Google am I supposed to imagine?

But wait! there's more!

Think of it as a vertical elipsis. There's more to see, but it appears vertically downwards.

That's how I think of it. Though, what I'm really thinking is "why are you hiding the important stuff?"

Insurers can't use 'act of war' excuse to avoid Merck's $1.4B NotPetya payout

Over there, over here

Russia invades Ukraine. Grain exports get bottled up. Some regions need those imports to feed their people. Starvation ensues, people die.

A insurance company says it won't pay out on life insurance policies, because "act of war"?

IBM's motto is 'Think' – its CEO reckons AI can do that as well as some workers

↑ This ↑

I've had glimpses of the "foundation stories" of several coworkers. They didn't grow up with *any* experience of 'normal'. They are still flailing with real life and sometimes we (the bystanders) catch the blows.

Pick a particularly failing coworker - ask them what number marriage they're in. Or, conversely, ask them how many step-parents they have.

Military helicopter crash blamed on failure to apply software patch

Re: Inevitable, given current standards

This comes closest to the rather obvious non sequitur: a military helicopter that can't be used flexibly. That spends some of the day unable to respond to emergencies.

I... I... think I'll shut down now as my brain is overheating... See you tomorrow.

Scientists speak their brains: Please don’t call us boffins

Re: Old fart (Must be male, according to 'logic' ?)

Yah, but that's the weekly summary of commentary delights. The *original* comment cannot be found by Google. Hmm, perhaps they have retroactively instituted "history off" against ElReg?

Old fart (Must be male, according to 'logic' ?)

Thought I'd drop in this oldey, from El Reg comments, from 2010 (but I can't Google the original article? Hey, ElReg?!?)

Arrests were made after an argument over stolen cake led to a fight among scientists studying sea birds on an Arctic island, in a muffin stuffing Baffin puffin boffin biffing cuffing.

VMware turns 25 today: Is it a mature professional or headed back to Mom's house?

Re: customer for ~23 years

Glad that their product evolution has been of service to you. My oldest order is dated 2000/12, for Linux and Windows products. I even bought a copy for my brother-in-law in 2009 to save him boots to DOS for some software he was reviving.

But what brings me here is: "The company started life serving developers with a desktop hypervisor so they could more easily test their work in multiple environments."

And so I last bought VMware in 2014, when with lack of support, dropped features, and inflation of prices they left this developer behind.

I understand that it's a cutthroat world out there. And the stock market demands more and more revenue/profit. But this developer customer thought I was supporting the company. Instead we were the throw-aways on the road to victory.

GitHub claims source code search engine is a game changer

Re: Why?

On the other side, looking at other people's code is finding out how 'standard' APIs really work. Sometimes, *if* they really work. Heck, *if* they are really utilized by anyone!

Programming blindly gets you pokes in the eye. I don't trust documentation to call out the pain points and gotchas in real world usage. Do you really think you can duplicate years worth of painfully discovered production oddities in your pitiful few 'tests'? I'll search through the code of successful mature projects to find "here be dragons" warnings. Long time ago reading jQuery source convinced me R.O.U.S. exist!

I'm not trying to copy their code, just avoid their gray hairs.

Microsoft injects AI into Teams so no one will ever forget what the meeting decided

Missing in action

An AI helping at improving organization seems likely to fail, when such organization doesn't already exist.

My "to wish for" standard of meeting notes looks like this: [CSSWG] Minutes Telecon 2023-01-25 [css-nesting] [css-text] [css-pseudo] and like this: [e-mail] from January 2023 by date

But that requires people being organized when coming to a meeting and a commitment to actually making progress. If not already true in your environment, new 'magic' won't work.

It's hard to implement a magic bullet when your company is more into political paint ball tournaments.