* Posts by sebacoustic

311 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Sep 2010

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Here's the ugliest global-warming chart you'll ever need to see

sebacoustic
IT Angle

Re: FWIW

OK "first computer model" has the IT angle... but really, we have known about this _much_longer: in fact https://xkcd.com/2889

Good on El Reg to weigh in on this.. not so many years ago they were happy enough to publish "climate sceptic" Lewis Page's infuriating nonsense so they have some making up to do.

The biggest microcode attack in our history is underway

sebacoustic
Thumb Up

Let me be the first to say

thanks for the insightful article.

You could say it's just built around one cute word play, bu I say, well done for that! An important point, well stated.

Huawei handed 2,596,148,429,267,413,
814,265,248,164,610,048 IPv6 addresses

sebacoustic
Boffin

baryon

electrons are leptons not baryons

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

sebacoustic

Re: In a pull request for the Linux kernel

my work PC runs Fedora... and my "work" browser is Edge (because.. Teams PWA). So I have the pleasure of Copilot albeit on Microsoft's cloud not the company's/my home's electricity bill.

EDIT: errm no. Just checked... it's now broken in MS's latest Edge package.. and nothing of value was lost.

India spending $170M to take its tax system paperless by rebuilding three legacy systems

sebacoustic

why develop in-house

... when they can offshore it to some cheap Indian IT shop... oh wait.

Andrew Tate's site ransacked, subscriber data stolen

sebacoustic

Re: Hurrah

replying to a post that I've 1+ed... ok it's not /.

yes markdown would be great but on second thoughts would we get an influx of ascii "art" which for the most part is only funny for the poster?

Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive

sebacoustic
Facepalm

At Last!

We now have a worthy successor to "Powerpoint makes people stupid"

TSMC's US operations threatened with employee discrimination class action

sebacoustic

US

I work for a US company with significant operations in Taiwan.. many of my Taiwanese colleagues speak excellent English. I don't really have contact with anybody else there unless someone can translate for me... as I don't speak Mandarin, or any of the other languages spoken there.

I doubt if anyone would get a promotion into management tier there unless they had a decent command of the English language.

Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

sebacoustic

2x10^34 that's a lot. Paid in dollar bills only a Plank length thick, that's a stack of ~1m

Musk claims Cybertruck has become profitable at last

sebacoustic

cursed plot

who came up with that stacked graph, visually _adding_ the rest of the world's EV adoption rate to China's adoption rate? This is insane.

Hold my Pimms! Wimbledon turns to tech for line-ball calls

sebacoustic

Today

This morning the Today programme reported on this story, they said they asked McEnroe to come on for the occasion and he declined, with those very words!

GNOME 47 brings back some customization options, but let's not go crazy

sebacoustic

gnome

I use gnome on Fedora for work day after day and it helps me stay focussed and productive, (as much as a DE can do such things which isn't a lot).

Is it pretty: yes, think so. I don't customise anything other than a background image, and an extension that keeps dock& top bar off the screen unitl I presss <super>.

Are there things that suck? Yeah, totally. But about a factor of 10 fewer than on the windows desktops I use via RDP. Oh yes, and the RDP client on Windows is basic to the point of being practically useless... wot? No hotkey for switching key sequences like <alt-tab> form local to remote and back? This sucks!!!!

I so use KDEs editor Kate for text editing though, since it has lots of useful nicknacks akin to notepad++ that I use. Ugly: yes. Do I care... not really.

SQL king Larry Ellison becomes sequel sultan with controlling interest in Paramount Global

sebacoustic

Normal people: Daddy can you buy me a Man United shirt?

Glazer's son: Daddy can you buy me Man United?

Normal people: Daddy can you buy a Paramount+ subscription?

Ellison's son: Daddy can you buy Paramount+?

UK tech pioneer Mike Lynch dead at 59

sebacoustic
Boffin

Bayes' Theorem

Bayes' theorem states

P(A|B) = P(A) P(B|A) / P(B)

where

P(A) probability a Yacht (named "Bayesian" without loss of generality) might sink

and

P(B) probability a horde of frustrated HPE lawyers aim to scuttle a yacht on a trip to celebrate their defeat in court

Admin took out a call center – and almost their career – with a cut and paste error

sebacoustic

Re: mit der Steife unten rechts

Nein! Nein!

Bonafide Kraut here, providing unnecessary detail:

"die Streife" means patrol (e.g. plod)

"der Streifen" means strip or stripe

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

sebacoustic
Meh

Re: What's it Actually For?

The rationale goes like this:

developer of service xyz (systemd unit), which needs "a directory and a named pipe in it" uses its own way to create temp dir like xyz_<currenttimestamp>/ but that may not work in some obscure context, maybe in a container or whatever.

The missive from systemd HQ is to rely on systemd-tmpfile instead where systemd guarantees it works for you. The consumer of tempfiles does not have to deal with edge cases any more. Overzealous --purge notwithstanding.

sebacoustic
Angel

In the grand scheme of things...

... all files are temporary.

Microsoft pulls Windows 11 24H2 from Insider Release Preview Channel

sebacoustic

Re: Recall recall as it recalls privacy & security

I was expecting the "recall" pun in the article, if not in the subheader. Was it "too obvious" for the Reg hack?

AI PCs are here but a killer application for biz users? Nope

sebacoustic
Thumb Up

Might be beneficial...

I wish i had an AI PC for work.. this one has but a puny Quadro P520 barely enough to run a game at a reduced resolution :-(

As I said: it _might_ be beneficial but not for my productivity

Was there no one at Microsoft who looked at Recall and said: This really, really sucks

sebacoustic

apart from the regular "privacy ..." Recall concerns

the simple but useful "show password" button, that you only push when you are sure nobody is looking over your shoulder: that's useless now because you never know when Recall might hit you!

Apple crushes creativity and its reputation in new iPad ad

sebacoustic

enough material for a bunch of film students' class projects. They'd better get James McGill to direct.

ByteDance 'would rather' torpedo TikTok than sell it off

sebacoustic

bytedance VPN

now there's something that would *really* worry me: a VPN under control company beholden to please the CCP rulers.

As an aside: accessing TikTok via VPN isn't really an option as the *app* will be banned from Apple's and Google's stores. On Android you _can_ still install stuff from other app stores but it's likely not enough to wean american teens off their iAddiction.

Logitech MX Brio 705 – where Ultra HD meets Ultra AI

sebacoustic

Also my web cam already offers 100% absolute face visibility, I consider this the absolute baseline functionality of *any* web cam.

Calling BS on this gem:

> Logitech said: "With MX Brio, users experience 2x better face visibility

SAP hits brakes on Tesla company car deal

sebacoustic

Re: Tesla warp erp

> Will never understand how it came to dominate the market.

probably to do with an army of sales people, driving around in cars, helps with that.

Apple Vision Pro is creating a new generation of glassholes

sebacoustic

Re: if only "Vision Pro" was easier to turn into an insulting portmanteau

You win 1 internet for the day for that: *Vision Pro*stitutes

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

sebacoustic

velodrome

in 2035, a Tour de France prologue purely underground, 280km through a tunnel before they install the accelerator hardware?

Musk claims that venting liquid oxygen caused Starship explosion

sebacoustic

Re: Its a Test

>why they didn’t just load a mass dummy instead

they ran out of Elon's old Tesla S's?

NASA, Lockheed Martin reveal subtly supersonic X-59 plane

sebacoustic

Re: US Presidential Requirements: Why 35 and Born in the US?

wisdom comes with age like cancer comes with smoking: it's a statistical process and not guaranteed to happen in every case.

Cases where it didn't happen: my cigar-smoking heavy-drinking uncle of 82 years, and DJT.

Silicon Valley weirdo's quest to dodge death – yours for $333 a month

sebacoustic

Thanks, I'll self-identify a milli-millionaire from now on

Why Nvidia and AMD are roasting each other over AI performance claims

sebacoustic
Coat

>Nvidia's HGX platform meanwhile tops out at 640GB.

640GB RAM should be enough for everybody!

Japanese brewery using generative AI to dream up new beverages

sebacoustic

> ...Thankfully the results will be tested by humans before being foisted on the public.

Not necessary: AI can generate consumer feedback more efficiently than focus group, survey etc... that's so last centrury!

PLACEHOLDER ONLY Someone please write witty headline here

sebacoustic

Re: For dev eyes only

I added a "I'm feeling lucky" checkbox in a dialog for ourt internal software which can speed up your workflow a lot by performing checks giving only a pass/fail but not persisting any detail as to why. Works great because 90% of the time people already know it's going to pass.

This was supoposed to get a "proper" name before it went into production but of course did pop up before users' eyes. We were informed that is "unfprofessional", and the checkbox is now called "Quick mode" and nobody understand what it does.

sebacoustic

Re: Sudden Impact

You're going to need a need a bigger envelope for doing calculations on the back of.

Is little Timmy somehow fixed in space and manages to stop dead a 500kg bot doing a runner's pace while squishing just 25.4mm?

If Timmy _is_ fixed in space by having his back against a wall, there'd be little chance of survival.

In a more realistic "inelastic collision" crash, 15km/h is typically survivable, the deadly threshold being somewhere in between speeds being considered in heated welsh debates.

Your password hygiene remains atrocious, says NordPass

sebacoustic

Re: For best results, use a password generator that can give you a long, random string"

so you're saying I should not use "letmein" any more but "keepothersout" is more secure? Ah, i get it now.

South Korea opens the door for robots to roam among pedestrians

sebacoustic
Boffin

Re: Sudden Impact

You're going to need a need a bigger envelope for doing calculations on the back of.

Is little Timmy somehow fixed in space and manages to stop dead a 500kg bot doing a runner's pace while squishing just 25.4mm?

If Timmy _is_ fixed in space by having his back against a wall, there'd be little chance of survival.

In a more realistic "inelastic collision" crash, 15km/h is typically survivable, the deadly threshold being somewhere in between speeds being considered in heated welsh debates.

It is 2023 and Excel's reign of date terror might finally be at an end

sebacoustic

Re: Great. We're getting there

Arguably dd/mm/yyyy is just almost as boneheaded as mm/dd/yyyy. My colleagues in Taiwan use yyyy-mm-dd regularly, that makes good sense as it sorts correctly, Excel date conversion or not.

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

sebacoustic
Mushroom

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

sebacoustic

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

sebacoustic

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

sebacoustic

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

sebacoustic
WTF?

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

sebacoustic

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'

sebacoustic

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

sebacoustic

Re: Equal Pay

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

Farewell WordPad, we hardly knew ye

sebacoustic

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

sebacoustic

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

sebacoustic

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

sebacoustic

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

sebacoustic
Boffin

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

sebacoustic

Re: That's not how IQ works

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

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