Posts by MyffyW

Salesforce engineers roll back change after breaking own cloud for hours today

Re: Might need to rethink those layoffs, eh ?

Those very thoughts were just relayed to me by our SI partner, not normally a hot bed of labour sentimentality.

Turns out you need smart techies even when everything is "inside the cloud" - who knew!

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

Re: Godlike genius Elon Musk ?

Beneath of the dignity of a respectable online tech site? True

... but I'm a former NME reader who even in her middle age thinks sarcasm is the highest form of wit

Re: Sure

I'm not at all certain exTwitter (can't bring myself to besmirch an innocent letter of the alphabet) is really worth $22bn. I think it's so toxic now it's going to go the way of Ratners.

The Clorox Company admits cyberattack causing 'widescale disruption'

Re: Maybe someday...

Regarding cyber crims, perhaps the karma police could pay them a visit?

BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year

What does this mean in practice?

Where I live it's not unusual for the 4G to barely register one or two bars, and then the phone to default to 3G, which is pretty shit, but will carry some data.

With 3G being retired will I now be left with no data? Or will the retirement only be done once the Telco is confident that 4G service is in place?

I think I know the answer to that last one, and I'm not comforted, but thought I'd ask the more knowledgeable amongst you.

Ford, BMW, Honda to steer bidirectional EV charging standard

Re: Voila!

@Pascal, upvote for nuclear power. Kudos for the Thorium reference (which makes this a very long term solution).

Re: Voila!

Join the queue, Wellyboot :-)

Scientists trace tiny moonquakes to Apollo 17 lander – left over from 1972

Re: El Reg comparators for temperature?

Well yes, 490 ships being launched for your rescue is no mean feet, but on the other hand I'm less than half as pretty as some Greek lass from ancient history. And I did say on a good day...

Re: El Reg comparators for temperature?

Considering foundry metals:

1) Just too hot to touch

2) Don't touch it

3) Can't touch this

4) Hammer time

Re: El Reg comparators for temperature?

I think we might fail, because the other El Reg units are interesting (or comical) as they scale, but nobody is going to describe a temperature of 23 degC as "23 Slightly Melty Vanilla Ice Creams", because your vanilla ice cream wouldn't be slightly melty at 23 degC, it will just be a runny mess.

- MyffyW, 490 milliHelens on a good day

One of my professors once remarked to us undergrads that the reason US publications used Fahrenheit was because America was a very backwards society. The tender care with which he conveyed this was pity rather than condescension.

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

Re: in a 3-3 economy class configuration.

@Joe_W this is the Zen of air travel. Leave your cares and false dignity behind. I was once a regular commuter on the Dublin - Liverpool Ryanair route. No pre-assigned seating. The knack was not boarding until the vary last minute, when you are literally the last passenger. Don't keep them waiting, just walk up once there is no longer a queue to board. You walk serenely onto the plane, to possibly the only remaining seat, the staff find somewhere for your luggage to go, you buckle up and off we go. Even the screaming child you're probably beside can't pull you out of this moment of perfect mindfulness.

Despite the hype, generative AI is not a significant chunk of enterprise cloud spend

Given half an eye to early retirement I am curious as to what my own knowledge of AI (both what it is and what it isn't) could fetch as a "consultant" to those that know no better. 'Tis a great pity I'm too embuggered with a conscience.

We all scream for ice cream – so why are McDonald's machines always broken?

Re: Better to find a Mr Whippy van

Dave, the venerable driver of the My Whippy van round our way, has a novel take on the cleaning regime. He wears blue nitrile gloves, and wipes everything down with a jay cloth, and if he should notice a spot that he's missed he just spits on the cloth and wipes it away.

But bless him, he doesn't seem to mind me paying for a 99 Flake with handfuls of 2 pence pieces.

Re: Limiting choice is anticompetitive

Business rules being slanted towards megacorps really isn't that much of a partisan issue, this is why our politics (in this sceptered isle) are broken as surely as they are in the United States.

The real battle, this century, is between those who are open to reason and argument and those who are deaf and blind to any evidence that contradicts their petrified ideology.

Turning this into a partisan point makes it less likely that any progress will be made.

Germany's wild boars still too radioactive to eat largely due to Cold War nuke tests

Speaking as the owner of quite a bit of black clothing, black lippy and dark purple nail varnish, I resemble that remark.

Re: This is actually a devious plan .....

@Margaret Atwood, is that you?

Re: Things are so bad...

True, but cows were the first to infiltrate a major religion...

OpenAI urges court to throw out authors' claims in AI copyright battle

Upvote for self-editing. Neutrons come from positron emission or s-shell electron capture. But you made a valid point

Re: Adversarial inputs, anyone?

I asked ChatGPT to quote the first 2 pages of Orwell's 1984. Replying that the novel was published in 1949 and was in the public domain, it got to the second paragraph "The hallway sm..." before it paused and then seconds later displayed the error message:

"This content may violate our content policy or terms of use. If you believe this to be in error, please submit your feedback — your input will aid our research in this area."

So there's something getting in the way of simply quoting. Ask it to quote Henry V, Act IV Scene iii (We few, We happy few) it provides an excerpt of the famous speech, not the whole "The king himself is rode to view their battle etc. etc."

Japan complains Fukushima water release created terrifying Chinese Spam monster

Re: Trade Opportunity?

I did wonder, one night watching somebody selling non-precious stones on QVC, if I could market corium (maybe from the legendary Elephant's Foot) as the next holistic healing crystal. It would certainly give you a warm glow.

Well, you would also need to take the entire Pacific Ocean and tap it very firmly on a counter top. But in theory[*] you'd then have a tritium and carbon-14 antidote.

[* Homeopathic theory which is, of course, complete and utter balderdash]

No you're wrong, don't you mean '80s Mall-Pop sensation, Tiffany?

I think we're alone now, there doesn't seem to any background radiation

Southern Water to drink up tech deals worth up to £358M

always seem to forget that part when it comes to how

Well I guess they leave out the "how" because they are a regulator, not the operator.

I do sympathise with being asked to do the impossible. It's the gap between overreaching ambition and reality that exists whether you are in the public or private sector. I just see the large amounts of profit taken since privatisation, and a curiously close alignment with the level of indebtedness accrued in the same time period.

Re: Leaks

Print off the documentation set and stuff it in the hole. Which is a good instruction to give to any CEO of a formally nationalised industry in my view.

I love that word "relationship." Covers all manner of sins, doesn't it?

IBM shows off its sense of humor in not-so-funny letter leak

Re: Really?

Speaking as a North Country girl, many is the time I would hear weary mothers on the bus shouting at their misbehaving progeny "Pack it in, our Wayne or I'll get yer Dad to leather you". Such tender maternal care! This demi-paradise! This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings! Sigh ... makes you proud to be ... half-Welsh

30 years on, Debian is at the heart of the world's most successful Linux distros

Re: free (as in beer)

I started playing with Linux because it was a free (as in beer) way of practicing my UNIX skills, for the day when I'd be let loose on the big beasts of AIX, HP-UX or Tru64 (yes I know that dates me).

How ironic that the "sandbox" OS I was using turned out to be their successor.

I do like the fact I don't have to manage a complex set of licenses and sub-clauses too. No count of processors and quibbling about cores. Or wondering whether the shifting sands of T&Cs have been massaged to make me owe the worlds 4th richest man a substantial portion of my company's net worth.

Voyager 2 found! Deep Space Network hears it chattering in space

Re: Reset?

Any post that uses parsecs in the correct context deserves an upvote. I'd upvote again for your maths if I could.

Re: Reset?

If I've done my Maths right* I calculate that all we need to do is put a massive radio telescope 0.7 light hours (~750 billion kilometers) from Earth, where Voyager 2 is actually pointing and we're back in business. I'm sure there's an egotistical billionaire or three that would be willing to try.

[*It's been a while since I put any real trust in my prowess with trigonometry, so your mileage (or km-age) may vary.]

Re: Contact!

To quote Jonathan Blake:

God! I miss Disco!

MIT boffins build battery alternative out of cement, carbon black, water

Re: So what's stopping all that energy ...

True - a lightening bolt has jumped through several hundred foot of insulating air, it's not going to care about a couple of foot at the tail end

Nah - they wouldn't put a made man in there, that would cause all sorts of inter-family problems. It will be some poor underling providing the organic matter.

NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

Re: Off topic

I clearly have to rethink some of my morals, because I had to re-read your post two times before I spotted the potential criminal behaviour. Try before you buy ... *smiles*

Re: Off topic

My flat mate built a teletext adapter for his PC as part of his final year project. He kindly offered to plug it into my PC bus, but I politely declined.

OpenAI pulls AI text detector due to it being a bit crap

Re: Correlating Commentards Causes Confusion

I can barely be arsed to write "no it doesn't, it uses (tokenisation)", but it looks like I now have.

Non-anon because as the beautifully-flawed Wendy James once sang, baby, I don't care.

Too many bytes and not enough bricks for datacenters

Ah La Belle France - well then it would have the advantage of being nuclear-powered (for the moment)

How about we run the cloudy-bollocks load on a rack of servers in everyone's home in place of our gas-fired boilers? All we'd need is additional electrical power, aircon in the summer, adequate physical security, reliable home broadband ... ok I'll get my coat

Re: Underground

Well yes, except for those fatbergs of lard and wet wipes which we've all managed to contribute to. Although, if we watch enough cat videos, maybe we can melt those too?

Microsoft’s Dublin DC power plant gets the, er, green light

Re: nuclear power plant

I, for one, welcome our new nuclear-powered .... no, can't bring myself to write it even in jest.

Re: Heat Engines - not CO2 are the climate problem

@Chris Coles, very very rough calculation* by yours truly estimates that Earth absorbs 500 Exa Watt Hours of energy from the sun annually. And it will absorb more if you add extra CO2, even in the parts per million range.

So the total heat emissions from heat engines are not material. But their CO2 is. Now let's get on with fixing that.

[*please do check my maths]

World's most internetty firm tries life off the net, and it's sillier than it seems

Re: It's not about the air gap

Maybe I'm too suspicious, but I too felt the dead hand of corporate oversight.

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

Re: Moron alert. Again

I'm all for renaming this toxic wasteland. Since Meta went all '80s apocalypse with Threads what better way to embrace the all-America dream than with The Day After

[Retreats to now-empty silo in Montana]

Re: "Mercurial" billionaire

52 and a half pence in new money? If you threw in a slice of cake I might buy the company for that. Minus the chief twat of course.

Don't, Pascal, because then he'll only monetise shitting in ones pants

Re: "Mercurial" billionaire

I'm thinking of him now as the less charming half-witted half-brother of the Mad Hatter.

Curiouser and curiouser...

Linux lover consumed a quarter of the network

Re: Charlie Says

I know - totally had that one handed to me, and all it took was some memory of my childhood trauma from the 1970s to get resurfaced. I mean, I'll need six months of counselling, but at least I got a few upvotes :-)

Grabs coat, the red one I was wearing by that pond...

Charlie Says

Never play with matches download that which can be posted to you in 48 hours"

Google toys with internet air-gap for some staff PCs

Re: No Network!!!

I think we should probably avoid networked computers. They seem to be the vulnerable bit (looks suspiciously at her fellow humans, looks in the mirror, doubts herself)

Slackware wasn't the first Linux distro, but it's the oldest still alive and kicking

Happy Birthday (Happy Birthday-yay-yay)

Ridiculously fond memories of running Slackware for the first time in autumn of 1997 when I should have been planning an NT4 migration. Got round to the NT4 migration between learning about Linux, XFree86 and all the GNU bells and whistles.