Posts by jake

52-year-old data tape could contain only known copy of UNIX V4

Re: Turns out...

The recording itself might be good, from a technical perspective ... it's the content that is bad.

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

Re: flashlight vs torch

Just to add to the conversation, if you go back in history a little[0] way, you'll find the Brits calling it an "electric torch".

_{cf. You'll find mentions in early Biggles books ... the ones you can't get anymore because they are politically incorrect by today's standards.}

_{[0] I remember some of my friends using the term in Yorkshire in the 60s/70s.}

Re: flashlight vs torch

That's pronounced "tacky torch", because invariably they are. Very tacky.

HTH

Re: curva

There used to be (still is? I don't know ... it was half a century ago, or thereabouts) a gambling & drinking establishment in Auburn, California. I can't remember their name, but I do remember their bumpersticker:

<bar logo & name> "Liquor in the front, poker in the rear"

The logo was a silhouette of a prospector panning in a creek.

Re: flashlight vs torch

Depends on what you mean by a "pitchfork".

Would that be a broadfork, a border fork, a compost fork, a digging fork, a hand fork, a manure fork or a spading fork?

_{Perhaps you actually mean a pitchfork ...}

Re: Program / Programme

Got me Os and As in Yorkshire. Heard flashlight about as often as torch. To this Yank, it always seemed to me that there was definitely a class difference the two. The taxi driver who worked on his own car would ask me to hold his torch as he fiddled around under the bonnet, while his neighbor the banker would occasionally come out with his flashlight if he noticed the torch's bulb getting dim.

And yes, both the torch fans and the flashlight preferrers both used bicycle lamp for that particular tool.

One thing we could all agree on ... Pints all 'round.

Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

... starting with the run-up to the official release of Win2003Server.

Win2K was the last semi-decently vetted MS operating system; it's all been downhill from there.

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

There were email-to-FTP gateways and attendant software that handled the drudge work for you.

Re: Implausible to say the least.

I used to download stuff to my account at Stanford using the fledgling Internet over Switched56, then ride the Bultaco over to the school[0] with a handful of 8" floppies (later QIC tapes) to collect the stuff for home use. Admittedly, the latency sucked, but my bandwidth was far higher than the modem at 1200 ... Later I did the same thing, except the files were downloaded to my server under Bryant Street in Palo Alto via BARRNet at T1 speed and I walked over to collect the data.

_{[0] Using San Francisquito Creek as a shortcut ... A hack that would probably get me hung, drawn and quartered by today's nature nazis.}

Here's one way to cut support ticket volume… send them to another company entirely

Nothing new.

In 1999, for some reason I had become the "go-to" computer guy for many of the Veterinarians on The Peninsula[0]. They were all running late 1980s, early 1990s IBM PCs (486 "ValuePoint" machines, for the most part), with SCO Xenix, now updated/graded to ver. 5.x[1] ... The Vet Practice Management software was provided by IDEXX, but was built by PSI ... Needless to say, IBM, SCO, PSI and IDEXX all claimed the other three were responsible for any Y2K issues that may (or may not) crop up.

Most of the Vets, assured by these four companies wonderful bedside manner, switched to Cornerstone or Avimark software running on Win98. I cheerfully set 'em up and then dropped out of that world (except for a few cases). Xenix had worked great, was never an issue in all the years I took care of them. Windows ... well, you know. I wasn't in the mood for the inevitable headaches.

_{[0] The Peninsula is the local name for the bit of San Andreas Fault fractured rock roughly between the Golden Gate and Palo Alto.}

_{[1] Note to the youngsters: That's the proper, original SCO, not the later, perverted SCO of litigation fame.}

Re: Doesn't have to ge AI

"To err is human, to really mess things up requires a computer." —Paul Ehrlich, The Farmers Almanac, 1978

_{And I'm pretty certain that it was a fairly well known saying prior to that ...}

Microsoft teases agents that become ‘independent users within the workforce’

Think of all the money you'll save!

Seriously, now you don't have to pay a mole in your competition's organization! With this technology, their computers will be talking to yours directly!

_{Hang on, wait ...}

'Vibe coding' named Word of the Year. Developers everywhere faceplant

Would certainly explain ...

... the bloody ugly huge dildo now polluting San Francisco's skyline.

_{Doesn't make the concept a sane one, though ...}

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

Re: cold wire

My job title at Bigger Blue was "Boffin at Large"; it was even on my business cards (only because they wouldn't let me use my preferred "Chief Cook & Bottle Washer"). My actual position? Floating Senior Member of the Technical Staff. I wandered from department to department, world-wide, putting out fires. Outside of running my own businesses, it was the least boring, most stressful and most satisfying job I have ever had.

Re: Has your tech team pranked colleagues?

That's not a prank. It's just a rather laughable lie.

I have been running Slackware as my primary desktop for almost a third of a century.

About a billion years ago in internet time (call it 1986) ...

... I filed a bug report on a batch of bad EEPROMs that were throwing spurious errors. In the bug report, on a lark (and to see if anyone actually read the bugr), I suggested that it was probably Alpha particles off the heavy metals concentrated from sea water evaporation in the salt pile in Redwood City, which was just off our shipping & receiving dock.

PhD Engineers scurried about for a week or so, until I confessed to the joke. I nearly got fired. It's amazing how little highly trained people know about stuff outside their field. Me, I generalize ... seems to keep me saner than most.

Note that back then there WERE some EEPROMS that were contaminated by Alpha particles[0], but that was caused by a manufacturing error before they were sealed up. If you know anything about such things, you'd know why my hoax was obviously bullshit.

Why bring this up here? In the 40ish years since then, I've heard the story of the salt pile in Redwood City ruining electronics "due to Alpha Particles" half a dozen times, at half a dozen companies, in three states, Canada, the UK and Australia. Usually in relation to spurious errors in comms gear. I suspect the hoax will out-live me by many decades. If you run across it in your meanderings and it causes you any trouble, I apologize ... have a cold one on me :-)

_{[0] Ours turned out to be part of the contaminated in manufacturing batch. Something about helium inadvertently getting introduced into the ceramic.}

Famed software engineer DJB tries Fil-C… and likes what he sees

Re: Not quite ...

I personally use the term based on long observation of so-called "craftsmen" (ab)using their tools. And then blaming the tool.

_{What? Kids today don't have to write their own compiler in order to get a degree? Well, THERE'S a part of your problem ...}

Re: Not quite ...

Common misconception.

Those are spiral shanked or ring shanked nails, not screws.

Re: Not quite ...

It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools.

Re: Not quite ...

That was a long-winded way of saying "C is HARD!".

Re: Not quite ...

A true professional has both nail guns and hammers in his toolbox ... and knows which tool to choose for a given job.

Not quite ...

"the language's extreme lack of safety is responsible for the bulk of the software vulnerabilities that require constant updates."

The language is responsible?

Is the hammer responsible for bending nails?

AI's trillion dollar deal wheel bubbling around Nvidia, OpenAI

Re: During the meanwhile ...

Said data centers don't even exist on paper (CAD, whatever) at the moment. Building materials aren't part of the conversation yet. To say nothing of site purchase, cleanup, EPA approval, planning permission, and all the other little paper-pushing exercises that go into a project of this size and scope.

Quite frankly, I'll be surprised if ground gets broken before the AI bubble bursts.

Re: Collapsar

I believe the actual term is "market correction".

Re: Hybrid Warfare?

Without dollars Putin has nothing.

During the meanwhile ...

Hundreds of billions of dollars involved, possibly several trillions ... But what is it actually buying? Nothing concrete, that's for sure.

The US economy is going to fold up faster than a used condom.

A couple dozen already extremely wealthy men will get much richer, and everybody else will be financially ruined when it all collapses.

It's not going to be pretty. I give it under a year. And probably decades to repair the damage.

From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world

Re: he wants the platform to be acceptable to all brands of Christianity

Specifically:

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. —Andrew S. Tanenbaum

That would be the Puritans, no? The group who were fundamentalist Church of England types?

If you check your history, they (nearly) all fucked off back to England and formed The Royal Society and took over many government functions BEFORE the US declared its independence. If anything, they left a bitter taste in the colonists mouths, and were a part of the reason most of the Founding Fathers spoke out against organized religion.

Which beast would that be?

Re: Reverend Lionel Preacherbot

Talk is cheap. Prove it.

Re: Hold your horses there, Pat

Concur on the fishing advise.

I've probably discovered more insight about myself when arse-deep in a trout stream than I have anywhere else. Recommended.

Re: Reverend Lionel Preacherbot

Computers do not now, and never will, believe in anything. They are incapable of belief.

Re: Bring out the comfy chair!

They will only call it heresy if it fails to make money.

What happens when you cross religious woo with ai woo?

More suckers being separated from their money than either alone would be my guess.

Debian demands Rust or rust in peace for legacy ports

Re: Enlightenment

"Which bit of the system is going to have to be written in Rust?"

All of it that can be accessed through APT, near as I can tell ... Presumably this includes the kernel.

Looking forward to Debian sunsetting the Linux kernel on or about May 2026. Should be good for a giggle :-)

This wouldn't happen if you install Slackware ...

Robotic lawnmower uses AI to dodge cats, toys

Two big problems.

The first is the little, tiny eight and a half inch cutting swath. That'll take forever to mow anything worth calling a lawn.

The second is the cutting heads ... essentially four X-acto blades. I'll bet they are cheap steel and need replacing every twenty minutes or half-hour of run-time, or thereabouts. I suppose one could sharpen the fiddly little bits if one wanted to do so, but how many times? How much are replacements?

Re: AI mover defeated by Quantum Cat

Nah. With no vacuum, it'll fling bits of grass and other weeds in all directions. The cats won't allow it to get within striking distance.

Introducing NTFSplus – because just one NTFS driver for Linux is never enough

Re: Oh god, there's ANOTHER grep bug

"The clue's in the name."

It certainly is. It's from the ed command g/regexp/p ... Globally find the Regular Expression and Print each line containing it.

See that phrase "Regular Expression"? There's your problem. The UNIX command grep was never designed to work on anything but regexps. YES, there have been bandaids applied through the years to work around this, but there have always been better options for searching binary files.

It's not a bug if you are using the program outside its design parameters.

Cyberpunks mess with Canada's water, energy, and farm systems

It's nearly 2026 ...

... and STILL there are people who think that connecting SCADA to publicly accessible networks is a good idea.

The mind absolutely boggles.

Claude code will send your data to crims ... if they ask it nicely

So basically ...

... Claude (and AI in general) is an insecure-by-design gimmick which should be avoided at all costs.

Good to know. Ta.

Dame Emma Thompson gives the 'AI revolution' both barrels

Re: Use a typewriter

$ Vim :-p

bash: Vim: command not found

$

Re: Linux for Luvvies

Nothing new about Slackware ... AI free since 1993.

The Chinese Box and Turing Test: AI has no intelligence at all

Re: The Muppet Test

Same as it does with any other pseudo-random group of humanity, of course.

Re: The Muppet Test

Consider that Turing himself called it "the imitation game" and all that implies, I rather suspect that renaming it as a "test" has wasted more time than almost anything else in the field of AI ... at least until quite recently.

Re: So much hype

The canonical work is Charles Mackay's "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions" from 1841.

The 1852 reprint, now titled "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" is available on Project Gutenberg. It is well worth a read.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm

Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware

Shirley you meant Röck Göds ...