Posts by jake

Thanks for fixing the computer lab. Now tell us why we shouldn’t expel you?

Re: Command.com

My first PC (personal computer) was a Heath H11, in late 1977. It has[0] 8" floppies.

[0] Yes, has. I still own her, and she still runs. Loudly.

Re: Sometimes you do what you have to do.

It;s not my story, I'm just sharing it.

Re: Sometimes you do what you have to do.

Somewhat strangely, the Brontes never wrote about love in the data center, even though they were contemporary with Ada Lovelace,

Re: Command.com

"where the platters were generally based on glass"

Originally alumin(i)um. Various ceramics have also been used for platters/

"rather than plastic"

Floppies (and mag tape) are almost universaly mylar, although I've seen a few cheap generic disks that were made of something less stable.

"was in use only 15 years ago."

It;s still in use today, in various places. A couple of weekends from now I will be doing the annual cleaning & adjusting (if needed) of a couple of 8" floppy drives that have been in near daily use since the late 1970s. They are attached to a couple pieces of equipment at a machine shop located in SillyConValley. I've replaced the read/write heads & the motors a couple times each with NOS[0] parts that I squirreled away in the '90s .... sometimes being a packrat pays the bills.

[0] New Old Stock ... brand new product that's been on the shelf for a while.

Sometimes you do what you have to do.

A couple decades ago my daughter got into trouble after getting root on a college Apple "server", so she could change a few settings to make it run more smoothly. After the so-called sysadmin found out and told management, she was going to be banned from the college network for a year ... but the sysadmin stepped up and admitted that her work fixed a couple-three major bottle-necks. She married him 5 years later ...

Pentagon shoots down UFO rumors but says 650 cases are still pending

Re: UAPs sounds right

"I guess we've still got the question of why gaffa tape sparks in the dark."

Triboluminescence.

That's why they changed the name.

That is part of the reason that they aren't Unidentified Flying Objects anymore, they are now called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.

More babble, less nonsense. They no longer assume "flying", nor "object".

The new term probably gives somebody, somewhere, the warm fuzzys. How cute.

Other than that, not much has changed since Project Blue Book.

4chan and other web sewers scraped up into Google's mega-library for training ML

"Despite all the whinging about 4chan comments being """racist""" or otherwise bad and mean, it has much better content than reddit or twitter"

That's roughly equivalent to arguing over whose cesspool smells better.

Re: Ah, yes. 4chan.

No, it originated on 4chan. The perps later used 8chan to drive up page hits (read: make money).

See this post of mine in reply to you on this very subject:

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/containing/4277061

No, there really isn't much of a difference.

Re: "Problematic, racist, and pornographic web content"

"how exactly is it "problematic""

It doesn't agree with their shaman of choice would be my guess.

Ah, yes. 4chan.

The kiddies who trolled QAnon into existence "for the lulz". Just the folks to feed into the AI of your choice.

Think Redmond had trouble with Tay? Might want to stock up on popcorn. I'll bring the beer.

To answer the question ...

"Are you still so keen to have generative AI write your emails, sales proposals, blog posts ... ?"

No, I am not. But then, being both educated and sane, I never was.

Thank you for asking.

Child-devouring pothole will never hurt a BMW driver again

Re: Wow

"Don't the majority of your readers sit at desks?"

Sometimes. The bulk of us aren't exactly chained to the thing.

Re: Wow

"or (somewhat controversially now) 'boffins'"

Boffin is only controversial among people who wish that their peers would call them boffin ... but their peers refuse.

Re: Plant more trees!

So their solution was to plant herbs in the potholes?

Sounds like Humboldt County here in California ...

Re: Plant more trees!

A five foot rootball would belong to a tree beyond the heavy-lift capability of most amateurs ... indeed, it would probably be beyond the lift capability of most UK city Councils.

Re: Tír na nÓg

Look on the bright side ... ElReg shcould have used sheela na gig instead.

_{Maybe this august rag is a family oriented red top after all ...}

Re: They should have called...

Sir Rod "Scotland Forever" Stewart lives in Essex?

That is so fitting, on so many levels ...

Deplatforming hate forums doesn't work, British boffins warn

Re: If you feed the trolls ...

When forming a valid opinion on these things, try to remember that "I read it on the Internet, so it must be true!" isn't really a valid methodology.

Re: If you feed the trolls ...

"you'd know they consider 'trans' to be an adjective, not a noun."

Not around here. From what I have observed these last decades, it is both.

Re: If you feed the trolls ...

"Worth noting, in some cases one's local police force (or a significant percentage of the individuals in it) are more sympathetic toward the trolls than their target."

If the law is on your side, escalate. No police force lives in a vacuum.

Re: If you feed the trolls ...

Minority viewpoints are often at odds with society at large ... thus the term "minority" in this context.

That doesn't make the minority viewpoint incorrect, it's just different.

HOWEVER, it doesn't automagically always make them correct, either.

Re: If you feed the trolls ...

"but it's a different answer to the one you supplied"

No, it's not a different answer. You speak to the cops. NOT speaking to the trolls still applies.

Adding levels of advice as the situation changes is just common sense, innit.

Re: If you feed the trolls ...

You haven't installed "deer" sprinklers?

_{Aiming is a fun project for an ATmega328.}

Re: If you feed the trolls ...

Yes, it is obviously the kids at fault. That doesn't preclude their parental unit(s) also being at fault.

Re: Demonstrably untrue

"I have possibly a bad habit of playing devil's advocaat."

So, as I've long suspected you're nothing more than a drunken two-bit troll.

Admission noted.

>plink<

Re: It's hardly censorship if ...

It is not censorship in any way, shape or form.

It is removing something from private property that costs more to keep than it provides to the property owner.

I don't rent out server space for my health, I do it to earn a living. If my admins are spending so much time dealing with complaints about someone that I have to hire more admins, that is taking money out of my pocket. So I kick the trolls out. Done, no problem.

Re: If you feed the trolls ...

"what are the targets supposed to do?"

If they go RealLife, you return the favo(u)r and call the cops. You do NOT go after the idiots yourself ... that's what they want. If that means you have to educate your local police force, so be it ... at least next time they will already have some clues.

Missing half the population?

""There are multiple research programs and field experiments on effective ways to detox young men from misogynistic attitudes, whether in youth clubs and other small groups, at the scale of schools, or even by gamifying the identification of propaganda that promotes hate," they argue."

Because as everybody knows, all young women are sweetness and light.

Only a government can be a censor.

"and can recruit replacements through the publicity arising from censorship."

It's hardly censorship if they can still spout their views and recruit new members.

If you feed the trolls ...

... you get to keep them.

All they are looking for is attention. Provide it, and they will return again and again. This has been known since the BBS days.

Chinese company claims it's built batteries so dense they can power electric airplanes

Re: I believe the word we are all searching for is ...

Yeahbut ... In the world of technology, such announcements, sans working examples, are more often than not vapo(u)rware.

I believe the word we are all searching for is ...

Bullshit.

Musk tells Twitter advertisers: You're welcome back, but don't make demands

Ads?

What are these things you call "ads", Mr. Musk?

Mars Helicopter completes 50th flight, 45 more than NASA planned

Re: Evolutionary edge

Sure.[0] Unfortunately, said chopper is not in the next valley over. It's on the other side of the planet. It would run out of battery charge cycles long before it got there.

[0] Maybe. The atmosphere is kinda thin, and the chopper generates barely enough lift to keep itself up.

Re: Evolutionary edge

Opportunity's been dead[0] for about 5 years, it can't even control it's own battery.

_{[0] More probably dormant, but nobody's going to volunteer to dust its panels anything soon.}

Cool.

NASA's over-achieving again, and we all benefit from it.

I wish I could say I was surprised ... but I'm not.

Beers all around; doubles for the fine folks at MarsLab.

Linux kernel 6.3 on track for debut next week after ‘nice uneventful release cycle’

Re: Watching paint dry

"Please wake me up when general userland drivers become available."

Too dangerous for no real benefit.

"Or when Linux becomes hard realtime."

Wrong horse for that course.

"Or when Linux provides its own init system."

The kernel already has it's own init system. After it runs, it passes control to init (if you are sane) or systemd (if you are not). The init receives the PID of 1 ... but computers count from 0. Did you ever stop to wonder what process had PID 0, and how it starts?

"Or when Linus swears again."

Daily, I'm sure ... he just keeps it out of publicly available print so the namby-pambys and hand-wringing curtain-twitchers have less to bitch about.

"Mämmi emerges from that process as a dark lump that The Register understands is sweet and a little gritty."

It's the first part of the process for making Kalja, which is a type of small beer ... It's an interesting, very old-school brew, and not for everyone's palate.

Pager hack faxed things up properly, again, and again, and again

Re: Last pager I saw...

"and you realize the ONLY medium that's usable is a 3.5" disc, using a USB external floppy drive on the Win10 box."

I'd have pulled the hard-drive out of the Win95 box and installed it into an external HDD case, and then plugged that into the Win10 box. That's assuming the Win95 machine didn't have ethernet of some description ... or ethernet couldn't be added fairly painlessly.

San Francisco fog defeats pack of Waymo robo-taxis

No, it's quite a bit more advanced than that.

Has to do with high and low pressure changing the depth of the marine layer, and the fact that the Golden Gate itself (the gap being bridged) is the only real opening in the Coastal mountain chain for many miles north and south. The size and shape of the bridge itself act as a scale against which it's fairly easy to read subtle differences in air pressure and the speed/direction of the wind, as well as the depth/thickness of the marine layer, and how high it is off the water. That's the gist of it, but there are other factors that help in the prediction (water temperature at the off-shore buoys being a big one). I can go out about three days with good accuracy, I know some old folks who can get five days out with pretty good precision.

San Francisco Fog has it's own entry in the Wiki near you.

Curiosity gets interplanetary software patch for better driving and more on Mars

"I don't think there's anything getting updated on the Voyagers anymore."

Voyager 1 received a software update/patch just last August, as reported in this very august journal.

Re: Eurpean format numbers?

"Bring back small amounts of storage"

I recommend (and use!) the ATmega328, and variations.

If you need/want a little more polish, try the Arduino line.

Before anyone says it, a pi is overkill at the level I'm talking. That doesn't make the pi a bad thing, mind, They have their place, too.

"Microsoft has heard of all of those."

Assumes facts not in evidence. Post proof or retract.

Re: software patch for better driving

To date, they've only dumpedsent one Tesla into space.

Still, it's a start ...

Re: Is the OS open source?

The Sojourner rover used a custom executive, it's base station, Pathfinder, used VxWorks.

The other rovers all used VxWorks.

Re: Eurpean format numbers?

"And I suspect that a) NASA can afford the very best and most efficient developers"

"Can" and "does" are very, very different concepts.

"and b) it probably uses boring, old, programming languages."

When those spacecraft were launched in 1977 they were hardly "old and boring". Perhaps you'd like to haul your happy ass out there and replace the hardware so it can now run "modern, exciting" programming languages?

Contrary to popular belief, "legacy" does not always mean "decrepit".

_{Do you suppose we should tell him his bank runs Fortran and COBOL as a matter of course?}

Re: Eurpean format numbers?

"And since memory, CPU and storage are cheap on earth, and security is kind of important, I think this probably means that those kids today are right. Better to have a fatter program which is secure and delivered quickly than an insecure program which is slender"

So in your opinion, it's OK to be a slovenly programmer and write bloated code because there is so much room to push your fat, ugly crap into these days? In my opinion, this is a symptom, not a solution.

" - and hard to port to multiple architectures"

I'm pretty sure that various flavo(u)rs of BSD might argue that point. To say nothing of the Linux kernel and core utilities.

Re: Eurpean format numbers?

"which they could have written in < 1kB themselves if they'd actually known how to write code."

FTFY

Re: Eurpean format numbers?

And about a gig of fonts.