Posts by sebacoustic

'Small monthly payment' only thing that stands between X and bot chaos, says Musk

Re: Updated version of the "Fletcher Memorial Home"?

> (We need a Toxic Environment Icon)

there you go sir

HP reveals bonkers $5k foldable tablet/laptop/desktop

so it's kind of the same as the Thinkpad Carbon X1 fold, just a smidgen larger. And you can have one: Lenovo seem to have run out of the things, which indicates that they didn't sell well.

Stoner Cats NFT project declawed for being an unregistered security

very interesting IMDB ratings histogram... 4.7/10 does not tell the whole story.

37% 10/10

37% 1/10

with very little in between... must be that it depends if the viewer is sufficiently stoned

Airbus takes its long, thin, plane on a ten-day test campaign

MAX anyone?

I wonder what awkward engineering choices had to be made here, in order to sell this modified plane as "more of the same" into fleets without having to re-certify their pilots?

Oracle disappoints market with revenue miss as Ellison hints at Azure database move

Am I reading this right?

actual quarterly sales: $12.45 billion, up nine percent year-on-year.

Analysts' expected sales $12.47 billion.

difference: 20 million

Stock market reaction:

9 percent share price slide, wiping around $30 billion

Note: I hate Oracle just as much as the next guy, no tears shed.

Guy who ran Bitcoins4Less tells Feds he had less than zero laundering protections

not SBF

so here's one who did at least serve his customers(*), rather than pissing away customers' hard-earned FTX-style.

(*) albeit their business not being guaranteed 100% above board.

Intel NUCs find fresh life in Asus, but rights are 'non-exclusive'

pushing PDFs

am i missing something here? is this a legit IT industry use case or just Vulture derision for regular office dronery?

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Re: Equal Pay

Yay, if they had those £800m they could even pay Larry with the change!

Farewell WordPad, we hardly knew ye

Re: Just the text

>15k vs 4k is a fart in the wind these days.

So you'd give someone £15k for £3k and a fart? Where do I apply?

With email, sending attachment more than 3x oversize is a lack of courtesy, unless excused by ignorance

WordPad

It will show a unix text file with line feeds correctly, whereas notepad shows a useless single line (that may not be the case in recent versions but I'm talking about the ancient stuff that lives on our "production" machines, computers that came wired up to expensive tools & equipment which is still n 27/7 use and can't be replaced without risk)

That's about the only reason it's being used here, but beware, it might decide to write a funny invisible first byte to designate a character set, an evil Windows hack that has buggered up automated workflows here in a not immediately obvious way.

I have met people who swear by it as the "Word Processor that does all I ever need", and that's a fair point really. Not that these will likely upgrade from W7 or W2k or whatever they're using

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

Re: "reduce task switching across windows and tabs to help stay focused"

"focused" as in "focused on making money for Micro$oft"

Budget satellite drag sail shows space junk how to gracefully exit orbit

Re: Retrofit?

Thing is, it's quite hard to find and get to those defunct satellites in orbit.

May I quote the venerable D Adams:

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

Controversial Chinese drone maker DJI debuts a cargo carrier

It might have much more payload capacity than a swallow but it can't complete in other ways: travelling over 300km a day for weeks at a time to migrate over 6000km, literally never landing while feeding and sleeping airborne, and being powered by little insects. Drone tech has catching up to do in some respects.

Biden urged to completely cripple AI chips to China

Re: That's not how IQ works

Where did you get the idea that IQ works? It's completely wrong.

Goodbye Azure AD, Entra the drag on your time and money

find ${SRC} --exec sed -i -E -e 's/AD/Entra/g' {} \;

what could possibly go wrong?

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

Plywood

Also known as "Orthogonal layers of beech placed under extreme pressure" by certain kind of suckers.

Liberté, Égalité, Spyware: France okays cops snooping on phones

accent

what happend to the aigu on spywaré, overzealous spellcheck?

Two new Linux desktops – one with deep roots – come to Debian

I did own a copy of Nextstep 3.3 and ran it on my tricked-out 16MB 486 but when linux grew up some in 1996 or so, I switched over to red hat then debian. I used WindowMaker and was all excited about GnuStep in the early 2000s but kind of turned away from it when other things came up... Nice to see it's still alive. And I do appreciate the NeXTStep look, and still think the vertical menu in the left corner is the correct idea, and miller columns for browsing hierarchical structures, are good. I wish Nautilus had miller columns, I think I'd used them as default probably.

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Yes all very well. My brother's in Germany and not an expert but has Mint on some ageing laptop, ran into trouble when during a fault at an early stage the machine hadn't loaded the German key map yet, bu t his root password had symbols from the german keyboard, GAAAAHH!

I advised to stick to letters/symbols that are common to both US and German keymap for a root PW....

Time running out for crew of missing Titanic tourist submarine

Re: putting in perspective

*money* being the operative word.

I hope the passengers' estates will be on the hook for all the rescue effort expenses, once they have given up, or succeeded.

Re: Dieseling

The air bubble will heat up a lot as it reduces in size to 1/300, but the millonaires' bodies inside are nigh on incompressible (just as if they were ordinary people) and they won't heat up much. The sub is only 6.7m long on the outside so a very rough calculation gives me 20m^3 air volume, in all you have less than 30kg of air in there, if that gets hot it's barely enough to cook the bodies to "well done" let alone burn them up. Thin dry combustible things like their clothes might burn (silk doesn't catch fire easily tho) but not the bodies.

SAP admits HANA Cloud makes for multicurrency messes

Singapore

no wonder, since an anagram of S/4HANA (=siahana) is: Asia? nah!

Intel to invest another $25 billion In Israel

Bottom line

Corporation care little about their investment going into a brutal apartheid state with unsustainable water habits that deplete the region, as long as the subsidies keep rolling in.

ChatGPT can't pass these medical exams – yet

multiple guess

60ish percent -- hmm. How high is the "tick boxes at random" score for this test?

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

not a burger

it's a hot dog menu: and the 3-dot icon is just an end-on view of the same delicacy.

India calls for all mobile phones to include FM radios

Re: Still waiting for DAB+ in my smartphone

> DAB isn't known for.. well, anything good.

In fact it's an anagram of BAD

Microsoft cries foul over UK gaming deal blocker but it's hard to feel sorry for them

Brexit and the Tories are terrible but the "my enemy's enemy is my friend" logic doesn't always work. "Brexit", "Tories", and "Microsoft" all score high on the "terrible" scale, but playing one off against the other is a transparent ploy.

It was funny hearing the MS big cheese cry crocodile tears on the Today programme though.

UK consortium bid for NHS data platform falls at first hurdle

Another brick in the wall

..or whatever metaphor is most useful for this: the process of the Tories hollowing-out of the NHS to the point where they can say "well it's so f***d we might as well replace it... oh whaddoyouknow i happen to have some friends who are happy to invest in a privatised health system!".

Euro privacy regulators sniff Italy's ChatGPT ban, consider a pizza the action

Still wonder...

can Google resist the data-slurping urge to somehow use people's interaction with its LLM to somehow be used a s training data?

Or was Tay's swift descent into a Godwin's cesspool enough of a cautionary tale?

Re: Extreme Right or Left Politicians...

> And you yours by ignoring the "extreme left" part...

Hmm just because their flag is red and one of the Cs in CCCP is a leftover relic from 1948 doesn't mean the Chinese government is "left" in any meaningful sense

Microsoft promises it's made Teams less confusing and resource hungry

Re: What the hell is shimmering?

Simmering, as in "chips frying": that was my true experience, my work computer (Dell workstation laptop with Fedora) used to go 100%CPU / fans whining, regularly at 4pm, with Teams being the culprit. Not sure what was going on but a "kill -9" would always sort it out.

Was the official "Teams beta" (rpm or flatpak, can't remember) from Microsoft at the time.

Now using the "PWA" in chrome, works pretty well. Compared to the "Skype for Business" we had before, it's light years ahead.

German political parties accused of microtargeting voters on Facebook

"An SPD spokesman .. party does not use microtargeting..tailoring of our campaigns is based on .. gender, language and age preferences..."

age preferences? really? Is one's self-assigned age the new frontier in the Culture Wars(TM)?

Lenovo Thinkpad X13s: The stealth Arm-powered laptop

Re: long-term Windows users are used to this and will barely notice

I principle I think it's a good idea to do install pending updates on shutdown, because that's when you just professed your intention to not use the computer for a bit.

Of course, no actual downloading should take place during the process, just installing pieces that have already been downloaded ion the background as you worked. Fedora does just that: install off-line updates, and it works fine, just a small number of niggles: 1) have to enter disk encryption passphrase during the restart that precedes the install 2) on my laptop, shutting the lid will suspend the update, it's be cool if it could get on with that as I pack up and go home.

Is Windows 11 more helpful in this regard? I doubt it but would be delighted to hear otherwise.

Tough luck, Brits: Binance suspends UK deposits and withdrawals

Re: Well certainly putting the "bin" in binance then

The giant never said that. He just said he'd smelled "the blood of an Englishman" and pronounced his intention to eat him.

Had he smelled any other nationals, he _might have_ eaten those by preference.

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 as a Linux laptop

T14s

The "sensible" alternative to the X1 used to be a T4xx s but now even that one (now called T14s) doesn't have an Ethernet socket any more.

Brit newspaper giant fills space with AI-assisted articles

chatGPT

that's just what an advanced AI would say though...

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

Toaster

That toaster incident seems to resonate: I remember an evacuation of our clean room production facility (this is a costly exercise...) due to a gormless employee cooking something in a toaster that had no place in there, I believe it was something unhealthy inside its plastic wrapper.

The stink lingered a while in the lunch room even after the incident.

Gartner: Oracle probes orgs for Java compliance after new licensing terms

Re: Is there still _any_ reason to run Oracle-branded Java?

some power-user add-ons such as a kind of "flight deck" thingie i can't remember the name of, java web start that isn't an utter nightmare, and a windows control panel.

Altogehter not worth it _for our organisation_ but ymmv

systemd 253: You're looking at the future of enterprise Linux boot processes

Re: so...?

Hm. No. More like "Please Mr. Microsoft can I build a kernel and you sign it for distribution to a wide audience wh run it on hardware that is mostly used for Windows deployments?"

You can sign your own kernels with your own key, just don't expect other people's machines to have the key installed out of the box.

Make Linux safer… or die trying

Re: Men

That's pretty misleading: yes, "man" means something like "anyone" or "someone" in german, regardless of gender, but it's not the word for a man (i.e. a male) which is "Mann".

The words sound similar but they are not the same, they don't even share etymological roots.

Nicht zu sehen hier, bitte gehen sie weiter.

Re: Men

That's pretty misleading... yes the word "man" means something like "someone" or "anyone" and it's used a lot, and regardless of gender.

But it's not the word for a male: that's "Mann" in German.

The words sound an look similar but they don't even share etymological roots.

Rentokil uses AI rat recognition to plot extermination in real time

Re: cables

Rodents - rats as well as mice - will try to eat almost anything they can sink their teeth into.

This is part of their evolutionary strategy: even though eating plastic doesn't nourish them or do them any good, and may even kill an individual, the point is they have _tried_. Don't knock it until you've tried it is really the point: if something new does turns out to be beneficial (e.g. there's some food _inside_ the plastic) then as a group they are onto it quickly. If they see one of their brothers suffer after eating something new: maybe they will even learn from that (this is speculation on my part, borne out of frustration with the success of rodents populating our house and garden)

MariaDB uses SPAC to begin NYSE trading in a tough market for public offerings

Larry E

Maybe Oracle will buy it and run it to the ground to eliminate a competitor? Yes sure it's GPL but they could throw sand into the development gears...

You get the internet you deserve

IoS

Read the subhead, and there was me, googling "IoS", thinking I'd missed a trend, then findding nothing relevant on the Wikipedia disambiguation page.

Then I read TFA.

The joke's on me. Thumbs up if you thought the same.

Killing trees with lasers isn’t cool, says Epson. So why are inkjets any better?

Re: Totally

i bought a £300 laser- read some reviews and chose a "small office.." one that has low operating cost because we do sometimes print lots (missus is a teacher...)

Now for "small office" well that's relative: a huge box arrived that had a "takes 2 people to handle" warning.

It's fast and efficient and relatively trouble-free, but boy it's big, had I checked the "physical dimensions" bit of the specs I would have chosen a different model

Re: Hmmm...

PDF has its purpose, and that is closely tied to printed copy.

Using PDF as anything other than a digital representation of a document _to be printed_ is, well, wrong.

The "P" should really stand for "printable" these days. It was "portable" as in "useable on Windows as well as whatever else". Not "Portable" as in useful for handheld devices (which incidentally is where PDF really sucks hairy donkey balls).

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

Re: TAI = UTC + 37 seconds, am I missing something?

> Can we do that for this climate bollocks too?

we're mostly doing just that, but it's a false equivalence: having the sun rise a bit later (according to the clock con the wall) is benign, but crop failures, parts of the world becoming uninhabitable, floods, droughts, and similar "bollocks", isn't.

Go back to your circa-2010 Lewis-Page-Editorial hellhole.

KFC bot urges Germans to mark Kristallnacht with cheesy chicken

11/11

the 11/11 is kind of special in Germany... many think it's the Stasi's final revenge that when they had to give up and open the border they did it on a day that was not going to be a future national holiday - because of the Kristallnacht.

Carnival fans in wide stretches of the catholic bits of western Germany have 11/11 as the start of the "silly season" (that goes on until after easter!)

And of course it's also "remembrance day", it was called "Heldengedenktag" (Hero's Remembrance Day) under the Nazis and these days not many f's given in the general population unlike here in UK.

Zoom adds email and calendar to its apps, to relieve the crushing burden of ALT-TAB

Zawinski

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”

http://catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html

Sherlock icon because there's no greybeard one

Microsoft leaves the Office, rebrands everything as 365

Imagine my surprise...

OK so it does look a bit arsey.

Still, it's a double-twisted Möbius tape so I had to (t's Friday after all) tear a strip off a piece of A4, fold it and staple it in the shape of the new MS365/goodle drive/arsehole logo and play with it.

Turns out if you tear the strip in half, you get... an intersecting triangle thing known as a Valknut, a Norse symbol co-opted by rightwing nutters as a symbol of white supremacy.

Plenty conspiracy theory material right there!