Posts by Luiz Abdala

Tech support chap told angry customer to think inside the box – and solved the problem

To be honest, a modern Apple phone would have no charger...

...and I wonder if the customer would dump the phone and buy a new one everytime it ran out of charge.

Re: IBM Only half user fail here

Those are the sort of Instruction Writers you need.

I had my first PC back in the day, an IBM Aptiva Pentium 100, that I needed to put a new HDD in it. The sucker had an 18-page-with-pictures booklet that allowed me not just to replace my HDD but also FLASH THE BIOS to read the new drive, because it was a thing back then, the BIOS didn't carry the instructions for all HDD geometries then.

Adding on top of that, it explicitly told me to make a 2GB partition in FAT32 to place Windows 95, because at startup it would not be able to read the full 20GB of the new drive. Win95 would see the new extended 18GB partition just fine, but not boot from it.

It was almost as someone had tried to do those instructions and reviewed the procedure. The kind of people that got the task to fit a square filter peg in a round hole for the Apollo 13 and wrote everything down.

I loved that kind of precision out of a company.

Patchpocalypse Now: Microsoft tops last month's record with 622 Patch Tuesday CVEs

I don't know if I shoul be happy or sad.

So many patches being issued should feel like a good thing: problems were found and are being corrected. The reason there are so many to patch, not so much.

Astronomers find sugar near the creamy center of the Milky Way (no caramel, though)

Re: Planet Willy Wonka!

Now I have to go watch that movie again. Or Brad Williams comedy. Savoring some processed fermented sugars.

One or several theories around the Fermi Paradox...

...suggest that the components to make life are easy and abundant, but planets that are stable for the millions of years required to create intelligent life are not.

This is just further evidence of the first part.

Even banks and hyperscalers are now sounding the alarm about the AI bubble

I got a hammer, find me nails.

AI is still a solution looking for a problem in most cases, it takes massive resources to work, very few projects showed an honest ROI (folding proteins, maybe? Big Pharma? The protein folding is speculative, so AI is perfect to generate models that can be checked later by conventional means) and I don't understand how the bubble didn't POP yet.

Yeah, for those that can lever AI, great. For the large majority of the rest of the mankind, not so much. The strain on memory chips and what not barely justifies investment.

People are still in the phase "this new tech is a hammer, find me some nails" enthusiastic adoption philosophy, which is very bad.

C programmers commit fresh crimes against readability

Do not allow AI on this contest.

I think AI must be banned from this contest at once. AI will be either Hors-Concours (because every single program is obfuscated, regardless of how hard it works towards not being it), or completely fail at doing creative stuff.

Otherwise, I had a lot of fun watching those tiny pieces of code doing interesting stuff.

DRAM it! Cheap PCs being priced out of existence as memory cost bites

I heard somewhere the RAM prices were rigged and they blamed AI to cover it up.

Some news outlets ran these articles. And mentioned that Samsung was fined for this before.

Pinch of salt and all that, but I don't think that's impossible either.

Former Microsoft engineer shrinks Notepad down to size

Notepad++

I was expecting stuff like script recognition or coding language (like .reg keys, autoexec.bat and config.sys files are instantly recognizable), hexadecimal editor, you know, fancy stuff for those low-level scripts and coding you need to do every now and then.

Even AutoHotKey coding can be read on Notepad++, which was remarkable.

But nope, that's the kind of bloat that COULD have happened to notepad. Giving it FONTS and bold/italic/underscore is not the way.

Glad he made it compact and lean at least.

NASA tests AI medic for astronauts too far from Earth to call a doctor

Once again, Star Trek...

... predicted something would happen over 60 years in advance. Well, more like 31 years, but still. ("The Doctor (portrayed by Robert Picardo) debuted in the Star Trek: Voyager series premiere, "Caretaker," which aired on January 16, 1995...")

I mean, if they put cameras on this thing and train a billion diagnostic images on the AI, it can improve beyond "described symptoms".

With due care, why not use AI. A 28-hour round trip message won't solve pressing medical issues that are likely to kill you in one.

Nothing prevents forwarding the issue to actual medics for cronic problems, either. It is better than having no treatment at all.

They've read the scroll thing! AI helps decipher ancient document charred by Vesuvius

Good use for AI

Finally a decent purpose for AI, once sufficiently trained on the characters, that are wrapped in a petrified scroll for a couple millenia. Yeah, keep using that Micron DDR5 DRAM for this, please.

What about hyeroglyphs and the Rosetta Stone, I wonder what else can be uncovered or correlated if an AI can be fed with this kind of archeological data and let it churn the recovered samples? I mean, not just those examples but every single instance of man-made pictograms that defy deciphering.

--------------------------------

PS. I wonder if that technology can be used for doctor's handwriting, altough modern MDs finally abandoned handwritten prescriptions and are using signed PDFs instead.

Infosys boss says vibe coding is no threat because there’s more to writing software than writing software

Writing code is easy. Writing the algorithm is the hard part.

Once you got what you want done in the smallest detail, you can put it in algorithm form, and then you could deliver that to any language coder and get it done.

I had my run-in with Pascal (and Delphi) and the hardest thing was to make the algorithm do what you wanted.

Windows 11 turns five, leaving some important lessons for Microsoft

I miss control panel.

Let me describe what exactly I am missing with examples:

- You have USB headphones, speakers on the motherboard, and hmdi sound on the monitor. You need to change the default between the three. I knew where all that was in Windows 7, and still can get that shorcut on Windows 10. Windows 10 still asks you sometimes if you want to use the monitor hdmi output (the gpu has all the functionality, the monitor does not).

- You just got a new monitor. It can play 4k at 200Hz or something. You also want to change power settings and the screensaver. Even in Windows 10 you have to fumble around to find all these in different places... why? They were all combined in previous versions.

- You need to increase swap file, and put them on a fast drive, or one made purposely empty, because some apps still use it. Go.

Windows 11 fails at being intuitive on where to look for all of these, Win 7/previous had them all in obvious places, THE CONTROL PANEL.

Ordering a trip back to 2009, with a side of nostalgia

About the Windows 11 and McDonald's...

An OS that refuses to setup a local domain user upon installation deserves to burn to a crisp and beyond. No wonder they are running an older OS on older hardware.

Win 11 is as broken as their ice cream machines.

I refuse to eat that sad meal.

(Flurry of puns achieved?)

Microsoft Access finally breaks free of its 22-inch form limit

You mentioned Excel. Now Excel 365 allows two people to open and edit a spreadsheet over Teams at the same time (not the same cell thankfully), and autosaves after every cell edit.

Yeah, you will reach the logical conclusion on your own.

"22 inches should be enough for anyone."

OH COME ON, nobody managed to read that in a straight face.

Specially from the company that said "640 kB ought to be enough for anybody" (not really, I know, but that´s the meme).

On the other hand, that's good news for people that need it.

The memory crisis is getting so bad that even retro RAM prices are going to the Moon

Memory was never cheap.

Back in the day, I was already on the Pentium 4 (and DDR2?), and wanted to boost an old Pentium 1st gen with enough memory to let it keep chugging as a printer server or linux whatever. IIRC 72MB of paired EDO RAM ought to do it for a machine that came with FOUR megabytes, again iirc.

I had to import it from Santa Clara, California at extortionate prices, plus shipping and import fees. Only mass scale made the components cheaper. They were never cheap themselves.

Going back to DDR whatever will still mean extortionate prices, because no scale.

Brazil probes emergency warning system after nationwide rogue alert

E-Voting Machines.

This happens on a Country that relies on Eletronic ballot voting machines where they type your equivalent of SSN and then you vote for candidate A or B.

And the Communist candidate keeps winning. Like in Venezuela.

PS. They banned the impression of a backup ballot in paper that gets put in old-fashioned sealed bag, allowing manual count if the system fails. Yep.

2,000 retired Google Pixel phones get a second life as a private cloud

That proves that phones should have removable batteries, and should never have stopped being so.

First, getting the obvious out of the way: The cpus, gpus, and memories on these things are still good to go. If they are hooked to a server cluster or still in your hand, it is irrelevant. Power management is also probably there, on par with best practices. Cooling would be also quickly solved (since the originals had no active powered cooling whatsoever, being phones). But the old batteries are still a liability. Just as they were about to become spicy pillows in your hands, nobody wants that in a server environment.

Now, on the other side of the equation: I could see Colleges and Institutions giving discounts for students that donated specific models of old phones still operational, batteries excluded. Or the population in general (even in 3rd world countries) donating their old phones for STEM causes, whatever they are.

A worldwide NGO just to retrieve and process phones in an industrial scale, while sending the batteries to recycling in Countries with that capacity.

It solves two or three worldwide problems with phones. Cheap compute, e-waste, and logistics for retrieving batteries for recycling tackled in a single lump.

AI and brain-computer interface allow speechless ALS patient to work a full-time job

One small step towards Warhammer 40k...

I'm happy for the people that benefit from this technlogy, even though it can be seriously misused 40 millenia down the road...

(altough that Dreadnought in Space Marine 2 was more than happy too.)

Windows devs rerolled old code to save precious bytes

Games need optimization too.

There is a youtuber famous for breaking games or pushing their code to the limit. Josh from "Let´s Game It Out".

He took a game called Satisfactory, and brought it to its knees. (You can still watch the whole thing, still up. The game was made in the Unreal Engine, by the way).

The devs took a look at what he did, took it as a challenge, and proceeded to optimize the code. They asked him for his save file to recreate the problem, and got to work.

They managed quite a lot of miracles, like reusing memory for assets (shocker!) and other things, and you could see IN REAL TIME the game chugging at 20 frames per second and going up to 45 or something after a patch, documented by Josh himself.

They liked so much what Josh did that they used HIS save file to take the pictures for the game on the Steam page. Not kidding, the game still uses his screenshots to this day.

BOFH: Nothing says 'business continuity' like a dry wooden broom

You can experience a breaker tripping due to a surge overload safely in Satisfactory!

Great game that one.

You can purposely build a power system and overload it happily, and watch the breaker trip over and over as all machines try to run at once.

The coat icon matches the aesthetic of the game.

California passes bill declaring death-by-algorithm to 3D-printed ghost guns

Phillip Andrew Luty has a word or two about this.

UK could not prevent a guy from making his toys in a shed.

No 3d-printing law can prevent you from disassembling mechanical parts until they become unrecognizable as 'toy' parts.

Mine is the one covered in metal shavings.

HP investigating BIOS updates that leave premium laptop users in boot loop limbo

The heydays of IBM...

Back in the day, even if you had bricked a Windows 95 (which wasn't hard to do), you had an imaged disc ready to unzip.

Now your machine can download and install a faulty BIOS without your express consent and brick itself.

BOFH: Vibe-coded solutions arrive for problems nobody has

Times New Roman article.

I like it. Or Chrome is having a seizure JUST on the BOFH article and missing HTML tags. This comment page is Arial or whatever, as usual.

Considering the entire BOFH list of articles has the same font, I assume it is proposital, and a neat detail that I missed for far too long.

Edit: forget that, some articles are Times New Roman, some are Arial. Is that AI messing with page generation?

The latest innovation in UK public transport: Schrödinger's trains

Even when it borks, it shows time.

It just beat Windows and most OSes by a mile. It still tells time even when borken.

Both Fedora and Ubuntu will get AI support – soon

Re: Learn what NOT to do from Microsoft:

Oh yeah I had to proofread that. You are right. They are NOT 'copiloting' any AI on the distro, indeed! They are just offering the tools for people to fiddle around with their own models, and that's okay.

Sorry about the rant, (which doesn't stop being true by the way).

Good job bringing it up, have a good one.

Learn what NOT to do from Microsoft:

- Offer the AI package, yes, but don't preinstall it.

- Don´t shove everything on it. Don´t shove it on everything.

- Let the users decide what to do with them.

- Don´t run the Patch Tuesday for your distro through an AI.

I think those are acceptable terms for an AI.

But there is one snag: What about the source code? Does ANY AI even HAVE a source code FOR THE TRAINED MODEL WEIGHTS? A Neural network doesn't generate a language-descripted code per se, so how do you plan to show the SOURCE CODE of something that DOESN'T HAVE a formal one? Or will an AI spit a compilable code in... (C? C#?) if you ask nicely?

I think the trained model weights of all AI violate the very principle of Copyleft, and gnu-Linux distribution in general. They don't have a source code, are not subject to review, and you can't ensure they will even work the same. They are black-boxes BY DEFINITION, and defeat the very cornerstone of Linux.

I don't know how people will even consider to distribute non-auditable code on a Linux distro without a series of caveat emptors and warnings.

You can publish the formal code that creates an AI and grow your own model weight, sure, why not, but distributing one grown AI model that violates every Linux definition, ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR DAMN MINDS?

Color me confused for people creating rules for Linux, and then tossing them aside like an inconvenience.

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: Centihours

Centihours feels the same as looking at decimal inches instead of fractional inches.

Well, when you are dying to leave for the day, every hour has 100 minutes, so...

I will get my coat and wait another 40 minutes between 4:58 and 5:00 pm.

Unexpected item in Windows' bagging area

Subtitles that change colors automatically given background? Activate windows disappears?

If I recall correctly, that Windows warning will never change color, regardless if the background matches its tone.

On the other hand, changing the background to that boring gray means you have a registered copy, so a catch-22 scenario ensues.

Brace for the patch tsunami: AI is unearthing decades of buried code debt

So, they want to use AI to fix old code bugs...

The relationship between code, AI, and bugs is completely different than that expectation, if you take what Microsoft has been doing recently into consideration...

I think it would work if every code had very verbose comments of what it is trying to do attached to it, allowing either human or AI to review it. Given we are talking about... x many gigabytes of code, then it would have a fair chance to work as intended...

But as it is these days, nope. Not a snowball chance in hell.

Hope your holiday was horrid: You botched the last thing you did before leaving

Well, VPN, you know... can lock you out of your own router.

I needed to fiddle with the DHCP on my home router.

But it wasn't for the life of me letting me login into it.

Turns out my VPN was on, making my pc to appear as an external entity to the router, which promptly slammed the door on my face.

Learning opportunity, and the test of router being locked down tight to prevent ANYTHING to connect to it, even if this something is on the internal interface, not the WAN port (which was routed throught the wan port because vpn, but still) was completed succesfully.

Server-room lock was nothing but a crock

I call this "Security by Obscurity".

See title and icon.

Decades-old Linux UI bug fixed by dev younger than the window manager

SmallFlaccid Teams, the other day...

I had a "This name is too long" error thrown at me from no other software than Teams.

Really? I had to actually rename the file with 8 characters to open it.

California ghost-gun bill wants 3D printers to play cop, EFF says

Philip A Luty wants to sell you a book.

Blocking 3D printing is a complete joke. Every single part can be redesigned or broken into more basic and irrecognizable pieces like a spicy Lego set.

Not to mention that a reasonable workshop contains all the tools required to manufacture a fullly automatic submachine gun. All the materials, namely metals, with required physical properties as elasticity or hardness required to its construction are publicly and widely available. The ammunition construction itself is also widely available, for all parts involved: warhead, cases, propellants, and whatever else, without ever touching a 3D printer in the first place.

Windows Update is a torture chamber for seldom-used PCs

Schedule? Service packs?

Steam is very clear about this. It schedules every game update you got instead of pushing them right away. I love that format.

Also, how about the concept of service packs? You know, several patches bundled together?

Every patch since Windows 11 was launched condensed in cumulative 6-month service packs doesn't sound so bad. You just need to download the last one, regardless if the machine was offline 30 days or 30 months.

Gym giant Basic-Fit confirms data on a million members stolen in cyberattack

If it was Planet Fitness...

...It would be a proper (as in, cruel and unusual) punishment to force the criminals to cancel every subscription personally, as well as paying for the cancellation fees.

(Yeah Fat electrician brought it to my attention)

Cryptographers place $5,000 bet whether quantum will matter

Re: In the words of Mandy Rice-Davies

Thank you for the Wikipedia article. Took me a while to figure out the sarcasm on criticizing the obvious self-interest.

Windows 95 let installers trash its files then fixed the mess behind their backs

I felt insulted when...

A certain webcam, which shall not be named, refused to install on Windows, and just after being coaxed with an update installer from the manufacturer, it finally worked.

Meanwhile, the thing worked when I plugged it on a PLAYSTATION THREE.

I noticed the PS3 had an interface for webcams buried in the menus, decided to try it, and out of the blue, it worked.

No explanation whatsoever.

Didn't DOOM or Quake do that?

I distinticly remember someone installing D or Q on a server every Friday and uninstalling it before Monday morning, and said game quietly overwriting a .DLL with a vintage version, and it was never caught because of THAT feature, until it failed on one fateful day.

Either that, or it was a Myth, a part of IT Lore that shall never be forgotten even if untrue.

Firefox 149 adds a free VPN and finally plays nice with Linux dialogs

Re: VPN is like the Warthog A10. It may look old but it works very well.

I never considered for a second that Google Ads would be thrown off by a VPN, - and they didn't - since I was advertising (ironic choice of words, eh?) my name and credentials, while fully logged in on Chrome.

Working as intended (or not advertised?).

VPN is like the Warthog A10. It may look old but it works very well.

Youtube pumping ads to me in Dutch is hilarious. I actually enjoyed the world tour in ads.

The day it pumped me ads in Japanese I learned about 5 new animes that weren't even on Crunchyroll yet!

To BSOD or not to BSOD? Only Microsoft knows the answer

Bork button.

Last I heard, the bork screen was reduced to a button labeled Copilot.

NASA sets 'impossible' ground rules for relocation of 'flown space vehicle'

Re: 747?

I have to admit, it would be extremely awesome and ironic if an Ukranian plane from Antonov was readily available to ferry an American Space Shuttle around, considering it was specifically built to carry the Buran.

In a parallel universe, that happened, I hope.

747?

Does anybody have a spare 747 with dorsal docking clamps laying around and a big-ass movable crane?

The drone swarm is coming, and NATO air defenses are too expensive to cope

Didn't the US deploy lasers aboard against drones in their ships?

Internet says the HELIOS system in the USS Preble cost $3.50 per shot against Iranian $20.000 drones. Considering it cost 150M to develop the thing, that's chump change and a solid ROI from a war budget point-of-view.

Maybe NATO is not ready, but the US of A is, on their ships.

On the other hand, a vehicle mounted 60kW system, however, is a whole other ball game.

CERN eggheads burn AI into silicon to stem data deluge

Good excuse.

If there is an excuse to build ASICs instead of mining cryptocoin and deal with EXABYTES of data per day to keep an AI busy forever, this is it.

Fiber on the surface of the moon could help detect moonquakes

Openreach/Cityfibre/Virgin running out of excuses to not put fiber to all their customers.

I simpathize with our friends accross the pond that still don't have fiber in their homes, to allow ultra large bandwidth internet access.

But if somebody finds it is cheaper to lay fiber ON THE MOON than to finish laying cables across ol'Blighty, heads should roll.

It's not a binary choice. Independent boffin builds a ternary CPU on an FPGA

Re: Surely a TrInary digIT should be called ...

I'm sure there is a BOFH somewhere mentioning that. I've read that before.