Posts by Andrew Scott

Europe's largest council kept auditors in the dark on Oracle rollout fiasco for 10 months

Re: 'on what they call "analogue" systems'

"One day there was a fire" or flood or earthquake or tornado.

Judge says Meta must defend claim it stripped copyright info from Llama's training fodder

on occasion i use the weird spelling "colour". Think that came out of some uk book i once read. should i be sued for plagiarism every time i use that spelling?

Is NASA's science budget heading for a black hole?

Re: All part of the plan

Clinton 1998-2001 balanced budget.

Uncle Sam mulls policing social media of all would-be citizens

Time to resurrect the House Un-American activities committee.

JetZero teams up with Delta to drag aviation into the future

Re: Flying Wing

Yes, that's the reason i remember for not using blended wing designs for passenger planes. Would need a lot more barf bags.

Eutelsat in talks with Euro leaders as they mull Starlink replacement in Ukraine

Re: Hmm

Yes, he really want a Nobel peace prize.

Strap in, get ready for more Rust drivers in Linux kernel

Re: Smallpox, eh?

Sure like my dad was "Unusually healthy" right up until he got polio! Jesus! Not look at those "unusually healthy" children in west Texas. Maybe you should use the "unusually healthy" children and adults in 1918-1919. My grandmother lived through that.

Manus mania is here: Chinese ‘general agent’ is this week’s ‘future of AI' and OpenAI-killer

Biased?

I asked deepseek what it knew about yi sun sin's and got a story about a Chinese politician. Seems not to know that there is anything in that part of asia except china. It does know something about "western" culture, so its training seems targeted.

Essential FOSS tools to make macOS suck less

Re: But why tho?

right, and take your cheap second hand laptop and upgrade it from the 8 gig it came with to 32 gigs. That something you can do with a mac? may upgrade the ssd to 1Tb from 500 gb. can so that with a mac? at a certain point the potential speed differences are academic. usually not much use except for bragging rights.

Re: But why tho?

vi? might as well use edlin.

Worry not. China's on the line saying AGI still a long way off

Re: Vacuum

might not be critical to the species, but it probably is to the individual and globally to the individuals that make up the extant members of that species. if none of them are motivated the species won't survive. If Zebras ignore lions individually the species will go extinct. If you touch something hot you will remove your hand from the source of the pain, you will remember you will try to mitigate the pain you feel. Don't see that feedback in llm's. important for learning. can't see being turned off or being "retrained" as "motivation" for an llm to "improve". Survival is a strong motivation for most living things.

'Cybertruck ownership comes with ... interesting fan mail'

I remember reading Andrew Tobias talking about wasting money, and saying that the thing most people were likely to waste money was on a car purchase. I could waste money on a cybertruck, but why? if i were driving a fiesta it would get me there, and my first car was an escort, probably less expensive. all i needed. good mileage for the time. Today, for the price of a cybertruck i could pay for all the gas i'll need in my lifetime and all the service i'll need for my car and still have money left over to replace it in 10 years. Sorry, don't get it. got nothing against cybertrucks, they are weird looking but if you want to drive one be my guest. just think the expense is sketchy.

Re: they're not like us

from my youth the rambler american. today lexus cars are pretty ugly. cybertruck pretty weird looking, but most pickup and pickup like trucks buyers don't seem to really need them and the ones i've seen aren't very good drivers especially if there's snow on the ground. they seem to think that more power is the solution to every driving problem, and in snow that is not a solution. been hit by two pickup trucks and if they'd been just a bit more careful wouldn't have happened.

Re: spoon-fed by media nonsense designed to make them hate Elon Musk and EVERY technology

wish there were, that way we'd be getting it in small doses. as it is we're getting drowned in the crap every day.

Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus promises Cloud PC comebacks in 30 minutes

Takes more than 30 minutes to restore windows from a flash drive in my experience. Sounds like they turn your computer into a browser so you can use 365 on the web and access your documents on-line using onedrive. They will move your documents from your local machine to onedrive leaving links pointing to the cloud. if you don't have access to the cloud you don't have access to your document. that's not a backup, that's and archive.

Microsoft: So what if it costs 4X as much to run Windows Server in AWS, Alibaba, and Google?

do they charge people more for running it on a mac?

AMD looks to undercut Nvidia, win gamers' hearts with RX 9070 series

Re: Reality

sure, went out this morning, 6 f thats -14 c and this is march. not enjoying that. by the time i got in my car i was having trouble feeling my fingers. with gloves on. very narrow focus on door handle and key to start.

Framework guns for cheap laptops with upgradeable alternative

Re: $899 is not cheap

you can certainly do as well or better with a 2nd hand/refurbished computer/laptop. haven't bought a new computer in years. actually have only bought a new computer once 24 years ago. there are some dealers who sell used/refurbished computers that are in pretty good shape that are good performers. you do have to know what your are buying though. look the machine up on the vendors site, and don't go to amazon. know someone who bought a macbook that was definitely hot. in other cases have seen specs that didn't apply to the computer listed.

Tech jobs are now white-collar trades that need apprentices, not a career crawl

Re: Communication "Preferences"

don't know about bright, but i really hate videos. rather have good readable documentation that i can read, take notes, bookmart, markup and take places that don't require network connectivity. a few pages of pdf printouts weight a lot less and can be folded.

Re: Please keep us in Brooks Brothers and yachts. Pleasssseee

sure, die in the harness like black beauty.

Ad-supported Microsoft Office bobs to the surface

Onlyoffice perhaps if libreoffice is not to your taste.

US Dept of Housing screens sabotaged to show deepfake of Trump sucking Elon's toes

2.3 million emails? how long will it take to read all of these? Sound like they need a new department just for this. Can hope the reply address what musks. expect it would break his inbox.

The software UK techies need to protect themselves now Apple's ADP won’t

Re: Hmm

Sure like the justice said "i know it when i see it"

Los Alamos boffins slap blinkers on satellites so we know who to blame in a crash

yes, was going to say "they've reinvented morse code" Samuel Morse would be proud. still going strong 100 year later.

DIMM techies weren’t allowed to leave the building until proven to not be pilferers

Re: Many years ago

Bought 2 gigs of ram for and old ibm server. 16 128 meg simms. Total price $4847.20 plus 6% tax. Had 4 pentium pro cpus running at 200 mhz. Also included 12 slots for scsa drives, pci slots, isa slots and eisa slots. used for early webserver using lamp setup. The camel of servers, but it worked for 10 years and did other things. Can't run a desktop or a laptop with that little memory anymore.

Re: DIMMs

I remember those. Also tape to cover the slot and make the disks read-only.

Re: TIL

not every state in the us has the same gun laws. very hard to own or buy a weapon in some states.

Elon Musk calls for International Space Station to be deorbited by 2027

Re: "There is very little incremental utility"

It turned out to be a place to park two astronauts while their Boeing capsule did a test re-entry to see if would survive de-orbit. Didn't sound like anyone except Boeing was sure it would make it down unscathed. Lost enough astronauts during ascent, descent and on the ground. Not the muskox's hide that was a risk.

The future of AI is ... analog? Upstart bags $100M to push GPU-like brains on less juice

Re: Full circle

blew a fuse once grounding the chassis of a 120 ac radio to a radiator. thought chassis ground was the same thing as my crystal radio ground. scar;y stuff in retrospect.

US newspaper publisher uses linguistic gymnastics to avoid saying its outage was due to ransomware

Had to move a system from one office to another and had the disk break down when i tried to bring the system back up. Got it booted in 10 minutes but had to restore all the accounts and data. Restored from dat and had a dean walk in at 1am expecting to log in and see all her data. Got it restored before she needed it, but didn't get to go home until 4am. Was back in the office at 8am and no one the wiser. Always tested my backups. Always had a plan for restoration, but like any plan you need flexibility when things fall apart. Problem was a bad solder joint on the molex power connection on a hard drive.

GNOME 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin

Re: I can feel the downvotes coming! Be gentle.

haven't really had to worry about the desktop since i was using dialup. found that kde was easier to use when i wanted to connect to my internet provider which at the time was using a modem over a telephone line. gnome just didn't work or at least i was unable to convince it to work but kde did. now with a cable modem and an ethernet connection it doesn't seem to matter what i use. not really concerned about the desktop features as long as the apps i need run.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not an illusion, but it soon might be

Re: Seems to match

think you should have stopped at merit.

US lawmakers press Trump admin to oppose UK's order for Apple iCloud backdoor

i suppose that this means that if there is a company in the UK that does end to end encryption of user data it has already been backdoored by the UK and is no longer secure. No point in a company claiming to ensure privacy on any data stored in the UK.

AI summaries turn real news into nonsense, BBC finds

Sounds like the llm's have been following the news and have discovered "alternative facts". Some do seem worse than others, deepseek-r1 being the worst i've encountered. I'm not sure i'd trust an llm to summarize something like a missed meeting.

Google confirms Gulf of Mexico renamed to appease Trump – but only in the US

Yes, been done before. Jackson ignored the supreme court and i believe that lincoln played fast and loose with it a few times.

Re: Google confirms Gulf of Mexico renamed to appease Trump – but only in the US

sad to see them knuckle under to the mega maga over something that's none of his business. He's also in the process of giving Ukraine back to russia.

DeepMind working on distributed training of large AI models

most of the llm's i've played with stay somewhere in the ballpark when you have a "conversation" or ask a question but my limited experience with deepseek-r1 is that those responses are often not on the same planet. i believe it's the worst model out there. it's responses aren't consistent within a single paragraph of output. llama3.2 does a better job and it's half the size. Really can't understand why nvidia investors were so worried about deepseek.

Sri Lanka goes bananas after monkey unplugs nation

Re: Stupid monkey went in to retrieve his frisbee

the witch doctor told me "oo e oo a a ting tang" not a monkey.

Datacenter energy use to more than double by 2030 thanks to AI's insatiable thirst

-6 F and single digit and teen F temps in the last 3 weeks makes it feel like you might welcome a 2 degree C warmup. haven't had to run air conditioning in more than a year though do burn through oil in the winter. Think it's been 10 years since we had much snow. 100 inches in 2015. Good thing there are people who keep actual records of daily highs and lows. might start doubting global warming if you relied on bad memory and hearsay.

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

years of no backup

was asked to restore a system that had been backed up on tape. Nothing had been backed up for 3 years i believe. the backup logs had been complaining that the backup had failed but no one had been looking at them. When i first started working on a file server i was in charge of backups. 80 meg file server being backed up to a 40 meg disk drive using a dos backup system. it fit because i only backed up user files, the directory system and account information. backup system created a file containing filename translation permissions and directory tree. it got so big that fragmentation slowed things to an almost unusable rate. never had to restore from it fortunately. Seen a lot of people use small usb disks and flash drives. usually after they realize the backup hasn't been working for a while. usually too late to do anything. check the backup process, logs etc. if you don't, you'll regret it.

Creators demand tech giants fess up and pay for all that AI training data

Re: I think Disney should compensate the entire creative world..

what about Barrie and peter pan and GOSH.

NASA solar mission data recovering after server room flood fiasco

been there. had just occupied the basement in the building. fortunately the server and backups were on the first/ground floor. first flood was caused when the muddy brook which was buried under a parking lot at the time overflowed and put a foot of water into the buildings basement all the way down the block. recovered from that and a week before christmas a water main broke just outside the front stairs putting things under 5 or 6 inches of water. most of the computer drives were above the level of the water so while the computers were dead the drives could be moved to spare machines and brought back up. got the entire office moved to the first floor conference room with networking and printers working as it was the end of the semester and these guys were at the busiest time of the year. both times the flooding happened at night over the weekend.

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

Re: Your work should be completed in your contracted hours

pretty much my weekend.

bad timing with support calls

had just been bought a Nokia phone so i'd always be available. Took two days off to see my niece graduate from high school in NY and hear Alan Alda give a speech. Got a call and had to leave the auditorium to take it and respond. Don't remember what it was, but not the first time. Driving back to work after visiting my Dad in a va hospital recovering from a broken neck and got a call that the server had swallowed an entire directory with its files. Was just getting back, and it turned out that someone moved the directory to a subdirectory when they decided to use a mac rather than a dos on a pc which didn't have that problem. used the mac to move it back to the proper position in the tree.

Microsoft quietly erases Windows 11 TPM 2.0 bypass workaround from help page

Re: MS doing their best to slow down the adoption of Windows 11

Think they always have. seems to me that computer companies were being charged by microsoft for any computer they sold that was microsoft compatible. that meant there was essentually a tax when you purchased a computer that was windows compatible but planned to use e.g. linux on it.

Oracle starts laying mines in JavaScript trademark battle

Re: EcmaScript

even the guy who invented the format said he pronounced it like the peanut butter.

just start calling it coffeescript.

You know something's wrong when Clippy fills you with nostalgia for simpler times

Re: Good Grief

Army ant's head is my first thought.

CompSci teacher sets lab task: Accidentally breaking the university

Re: Not even our fault...

Someone once connected a apple wireless router to a port in an office on campus, caused everyone in range to come up with a private unroutable ip address. called it in to ITS when people started complaining that they had lost their internet access. Most computers were on ethernet at the time very few using wifi except macs. Didn't have a campus wide wifi network yet. so in trying to add wifi to his office killed all the ethernet connected computers in range.

You're going to do what to the feature? Microsoft defines what it means by 'deprecation'

like a mixed metaphor. 12th night the Scottish play and Henry iv part 4. weird combo.