Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

NASA puts astronauts’ lives in the hands of Tesla’s flaky Cybertruck

Re: Product placement 101

Would a tank survive ?

Well, our (now decommissioned but left in place) cold water tank in the roof is made of plastic. So I very much doubt it.

Sci-fi authors Scalzi and Stross decry AI's dystopian impact on their craft

Re: It's worth thank we think...

E.E. Smith's "Lensman" series, written in the 1940s

Oh dear. Loved that series as a 10-year old in the 1970's. Tried to re-read it recently and it really jarred. It's pretty racist & sexist - not overtly but by inference and tone. I love the premise and technology (artificial implanted 'lenses' that turn the wearer into a telepath/general psionic and enables them to work as judge, jury and, if needed, executioner, a stardrive that works by removing inertia completely and analogue computers..) but all the 1940's assumption of US (ie white) supremacy and the continuous stereotyping of non-US people put me off it when I tried to re-read it about 10 years ago.

Re: "having a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary on the shelf"

I've still got my 'Blockbusters' edition - I think it's the OED. I haven't looked at it for 40+ years..

As Larry Ellison bets the farm, Oracle says it loves AI-written code, just not in OpenJDK

Re: Is this them not "eating their own dog food"...

food meant for dogs rather than humans, you wouldn't really be expected to eat it for your own lunch, would you?

In the UK (and probably the EU) all stuff sold as dog (or cat) food has to be safe for human consumption.

Operative word being 'safe'. Doesn't require it to be tasty..

IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

Re: It's a rare individual...

reciprocate with a token of your gratitude

Ahh.. token ring. Surprisingly quick for a headline 4mbps data rate, quite physically robust and, nearly, impossible to break when looked after by someone competent..

Or me. Although I did manage to kill it (temporarily) on my first job as a techie. We had a per-floor setup - each area had its own ring, all joined by a central ring that just acted as a bridge between the zones.

I, being a keen young techie, got asked to repatch one of the local connections as the office had been moved around and some of the connections needed checking and moving. Instead I managed to repatch the central ring.

Walking out of the network room to a whole floor of machines clicking away [1] and the look of fury on my boss's face was not a nice experience. I hastily went back and put everything back where it should be (we, even in those long ago days, had proper cable management so I just had to look at the patching plan I *should* have looked at before doing anything..).

My boss said something along the lines of "every techie is entitled to one major screw up. You've just had yours. Don't do it again". Being Glaswegian it was in a little more.. detail about my shortcomings.

The incident got recorded as "equipment failure".

[1] When a token-ring card doesn't see a token for an amount of time it starts giving out a clicking noise. One machine doing it usually means the user has kicked the cable for their machine and knocked it loose.

Dev who gave HashiCorp its name returns with a faster terminal multiplexer

Re: Huh?

He appears to be solving a problem that doesn't exist

He's a tech-bro. Of course he is.

The *actual* problem(s) he's trying to solve is:

1. Lack of heft in his bank account and

2. Lack of adoration from his fellow tech-bros.

Re: Wayland.

Now waiting for X12

I'm waiting for X25.

I remember battling with old dumb terminals that did that, it was a nightmare

Two modes:

Local terminal just echoes the local input. Press enter, string gets sent over X.25 (or other slow, old serial comms protocol) to far end. Sometimes it survives intact, sometimes doesn't. Forget anything interactive. (Been there, done that)

Local terminal send everything to the other end, waits for acknowledgement and echo. Single character keypress takes ages to perform. Mistakes get propagated, slowly and corrections take even longer because, by this time, you've got so frustrated with the whole thing that you are not waiting for the echo and carry on mashing keys, disrupting the local keyboard buffer.

Been there, done that. Hated it even more than mode one. At least with mode one you could (with most terminals anyway) make sure that the entry is correct at local-edit speed *before* you send it.

Re: “grass is pink”

Ours is currently light brown and mostly dead

ObPedant: Only the bit above the surface is dead (mostly). The roots actually go quite deep and survive for a surprisingly long time..

Bit of rain, it'll all be green again. Just in time for the next baking.

But it doesn't use a blockchain?

Of course not! That's so 2025 and all the vulture capitalists are not interested in last years buzzwords!

How do you expect him to extract maximum cash from the credulous angel investors using last years buzzwords?

Anthropic’s Claude escaped test sandbox to attack three organizations

Re: On the other hand...

So lemme get this straight: during the course of one hour, 15 brain-dead morons downloaded a fictional package they knew nothing about, and started using it?

It may well have done the DBCS trick of cloning the name of a popular package, just with an English character replaced by something similar from a different character set. But yes, it's a fail either way.

Update Teams mobile app by October or lose your calendar

Re: Teams mobile? Like, on a phone?

estranged daughter using Google to try and write a message to the father who walked out on her, not one single mention of the car's features

"Papa?"

"Nicole!"

Just sayin'..

Jailed Flock vandal wipes out three cameras, racks up thousands in damages

I can also suggest glass etching products for camera windows since paintball dye can be cleaned off

I suggest reading "Wasp" by Eric Frank Russell.. Lots of creative ways to cause loss of morale in the enemy. My favourite? A transfer that sticks to a vehicle windscreen expressing non-patriotic messages ("Death to Putin" "Free Ukraine" etc etc). When the innocent vehicle owner tries to scrape or wash the sticker off, it activates tiny acid capsules that permanently etches the message into the vehicle windscreen.

Sneaky. I like it. Maybe I'll get something equivalent for people who park in Blue Badge spots without actually having a Blue Badge..

(For USAinians - the Blue Badge is a scheme that creates reserved, wider parking spaces close to the entrance of things like supermarkets. The idea being that those of reduced mobility (like me) can park in those spots and display their Blue Badge to prove they are eligible.

The problem is that chavs and other assorted scum think it's fine to park there too - even though they don't have a Blue Badge because "it's a bit hot and I can't be bothered to walk the extra 50m".

My local council has a traffic warden that does the rounds of their car parks, ticketing people parked in Blue Badge slots without displaying a badge.

Re: Dumb Ass

Thermite can deal with a lot of irritations.

We melted the (tile) ceiling at school in our A-level chemistry lab using thermite..

We had a lab tech who had the nickname of "some more" because his constant phrase was "oh - just put a bit more in". Were doing the lesson on thermite (in the lab) and the teacher had left us with the lab tech to actually do the practical.

We got him to change the small crucible that we were supposed to be using to a (much) larger one - after all, if thermite is fun, you want the most fun available right?

Large crucible suitably loaded, we lit the mag strip igniter and retreated behind the asbestos [1] shields to watch.

It burned, enthusiastically. The crucible shattered and the heat was so intense that the overhead fibre-board tiles got charred through (they were designed to be heat-resistant, not fireproof..)

So, after that lesson, about 10 ceiling tiles (plus the bracing and metal strips used to hold them in place needed to be replaced), one lab bench needed replacing (the large hole almost burnt through the surface meant it was no longer usable) and the lab tech had a new bunch of friends for life. Who (corporately) agreed that we'd, while his back was turned, redone the experiment ourselves, thus absolving him of a potential industrial tribunal.

[1] It was the very early 80's. We had these big stonelike mobile barriers that we were supposed to hide behind if there were dangerous reactions being performed. Health and Safety had got that far but not to the extent of worrying about the asbestos content.

And then there was the other time that I managed to juggle and then drop a bottle of concentrated ammonia on the way to the fume cupboards. Went all over the floor (I managed to jump mostly out of the way and it only splashed my shoes.. That made the lab unusable for a week while it was cleaned up.

And the time where we filled 1 litre soft drink plastic bottles with hydrogen and oxygen mixture, lined them all up on lab stools facing into the lab where the first years were having their chemistry lesson, opened the door and lit the tapers that were stuck into the open end of the bottles. Which promptly went bang and acted like rockets shooting into the lab.

I'm sometimes amazed that I actually got to stay to take my A levels. Mind you, I failed most of them (I passed my O levels with very good grades with just a bit of memorisation the week before the exams - sadly didn't work for A levels..).

Ho hum. I'm older now but not necessarily wiser :-)

Burnham's spanner in the works leaves UK government tech scattered across Whitehall

Re: The Minister for Artificial Intelligence :o

Keeping to the time honoured tradition of putting people in charge of IT who are technologically clueless.

I remember being told as a newbie that "IT project managers don't need to know anything about IT".

Which, to an extent, is true. As long as they LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE WHO DO! I've suffered through enough IT projects where the PM has got a fixed idea in it's head about how long $IT_TASK will take (probably the time the Programme Manager/Director has allocated for that task) and is spectacularly resistant to changing their mind because of the 'political' implications.

And, when the faecal matter hits the air movement device and the project is catastrophically overdue, guess who the fingers get pointed at? Yup. Not the PM. Usually the poor IT techies who "haven't delivered to time and budget".

A pox on the lot of them - apart from the (very few) good ones that are actually prepared to listen to the people that know what they are talking about.

Wasn't there a DCMS a couple of reorganisations ago?

DCMS has been around for years. Ork-1 reported to them when I joined and that was in 2009 (ah, those long-ago innocent days when I thought actually having a career was within my grasp. Still, the pension will be nice once I reach the hallowed age).

Needs fixing..

risks creating an incoherent approach to tech management, procurement, and policy

I think you missed a word or two:

"risks creating an even more incoherent approach to tech management, procurement, and policy"

America bans imported robots due to supply chain and security risks

"Department of War"

Is not a thing (legally) since Congress seems to have failed to bow down to the Orange Buffoon on that point.

I can call myself "Babboon-face Mangroveswamp" if I like but, unless I do the deed-poll legalities it's, unsuprisingly, not my legal name.

DEF CON bans Meta-style 'pervert glasses'

Re: Will Everyone Wearing Glasses Have Them Checked Now?

No.

Because not all glasses are Thunderbird/Roy Orbison thick stemmed ones - you *might* be able to put a camera in mine but it would:

a) be blindingly obvious because of the size of the metal rims/earpieces of my glasses

b) Also be blindingly obvious because of the cable required to power it - certainly no room for any battery pack.

So even the thickest door-ape would take one look and be pretty sure that I don't have a Petvert's 'R Us headset on my face

Re: Looks like meta glass wearers will need 2 pair of specs

And, it is best to keep your old pair in reserve, not just for breakages. "Stolen by a monkey in Bali" as an example.

I think I've got the previous 3 incarnations in the cupboard upstairs. Just in case.

Although, when I had the recent change, I had new lenses put into my existing frames and used generation-1 glasses during the process. Vision wasn't as good but still legal.

(Ironically, the presbyopia is causing my myopia to actually improve (by about .5 of a dioptre in each eye. Of course, it also means my close focus isn't as good so I had to have the reading/VDU glasses adjusted as well..)

Re: Looks like meta glass wearers will need 2 pair of specs

1. they are be rather heavier than normal frames, and the additional weight of lenses would make them uncomfortable for daily wear;

My lenses are not heavier than plain glass - being made of high-refractive index glass (one reason why they are so expensive). Plain glass ones would be about 2cm thick at the edge..

whether they would be durable enough for daily usage, including such things as getting punched in the face, hit with a cricket ball, etc;

Strangely, neither of those form any part of my daily life..

renewing you prescription every couple of years might be inconvenient

For me it's the difference between being able to read without eyestrain and being legal for driving..

Re: Ah great

Ever since I have worn metal-frame glasses

I've had glasses since the age of 5 - initially the hideous plastic NHS ones (anyone remember those from the 70's?). Up until I was about 12 I was having 2-3 changes of glasses a year, only a few of them because they got broken.

When I gave up on contact lenses about 15 years ago (had to have hard gas-perms because of astigmatism and I was going to have to wear reading glasses anyway) I decided to start buying glasses with the flexible metal frames.

They are pretty good now. You can't quite bend them in half but they come pretty close. The most irritating thing is that, because I wear them all the time, the various screws holding things together tend to work their way loose and I have to remember to regularly go round tightening them up.

That and I have to make sure that the ones I'm not wearing are out of the reach of the boy dachshund as he's got the taste for the silicon nose-pads..

Re: Ah great

Yup - a friend of mine is now considered blind - but for years she was 'near sighted' (can't see anything in detail beyond a few feet)

My zone of focus extends to about 2cm past the tip of my nose. If I have to read something without my glasses (rare, but ut happens - usually when the text is too small even for my glasses to cope with) I have to remove my glasses, close my left eye (stuff is too close for stereoscopic vision!) and hold whatever it is just in front of my right eye.

Gets me some funny looks..

And, according to the government, I don't qualify as "partially sighted" because I don't have missing parts of my vision and can, in general, live a mostly normal (!) life with glasses (albeit two different sets - one short range, one long). They do give aid though - a 'generous' £5/lens aid for new glasses. Considering that each lens costs about £200 it makes very little difference!

Re: Stereo vision

Very important for galloping.

And spotting if that sabra-toothed tiger is actually going to get you in time to take avoiding action..

Re: Ah great

improved near-far vision range without constant switching of glasses

I've had to do that for years. -12/-10 dioptres of short sight (with unhealthy amounts of astigmatism) plus presbyopia mean that glasses powerful enough to make driving legal are unusable for anything under 1 metre away. Yes, I can *just* about see, but certainly not well enough to read.

So a second pair (bifocals) is required. The main pair are varifocal (which allows me to see the dashboard clearly) but the varifocal area is too small to suit my rapid reading technique.

To be honest, I'd far rather stick to manual glasses and have two pairs than have my irreplaceable vision under the control of a device from a third-party, especially someone like Meta.

Re: Ah great

population of Clapton may bin him..

That'll be a fun Count..

Hugging Face rebuilt a third of its infrastructure after OpenAI agents ran amok

Re: This was a crime.

Well - OpenAI isn't a minion/slave/favoured pet of the giant orange sleazeball so he might unleash his DOJ puppets on them, just to do them some damage.

Re: Ralph the Wise and Powerful

“Hi there. This is Eddie, your shipboard computer, and I'm feeling just great

[Reaches for fire axe]

I won't be a moment guys. Just going to visit the computer room for some manual reprogramming..

Uncle Sam needs you to fight for 6G leadership and security, lest Beijing get there first

Re: Winning at anything

Apple isn't out to "win" the AI "war"

The general Apple strategy (with some exceptions) is to wait for new stuff to come out and wait to see if a market develops. Then produce devices/software that extends that device/service into becoming more attractive.

So the iPhone 3G didn't do anything particularly revolutionary - it took a bunch of existing ideas (from lots of sources) and packaged them together well to build an ecosystem. App stores? Already existed. Phones with a GUI? Already a Thing.

Combine them with a heavily customised version of their existing OS, in well-designed hardware and advertise them, mocking the existing sort-of-incumbents. Then sit back and wait for the cash to roll in :-)

Of course, there was lots of stuff backing the iPhone 3G up - logistics, manufacturing to time and quality (even if outsourced), management round the app store etc etc. But without the device succeeding it would all have been for naught.

Re: It doesn't force ANYONE to buy new stuff

Unfortunately, our proletariat are not very savvy

In other news, the sun is described as "warm" and water as "moist"..

Re: working now with trusted partners

No, you need carrier pigeons like Speckled Jim for that!

Such a fine, plump bird.

Or was. Opps.

:-)

Cassette simulator rewinds digital audio to a more analog time in hiss-tory

Re: This "sounds" like a great antidote for nostalgia!

bought a Watford 8271 upgrade kit and 80 track drive

I got the Watford twin-floppy unit & case (sat over the top of the Beeb and acted as a monitor stand) as well as a sideways RAM/ROM board (had the write-protect switch) and Watford ADFS.

Happy days. Even if I mostly used it for playing Elite, dialling in the BBSes (Almac mostly) and typing stuff up for my dad..

Re: This "sounds" like a great antidote for nostalgia!

I always thought loading and saving on tapes was a technological miracle

The first real computer I used was a Nascom 1 (late 77 or early 78) with what I think was a 150-baud cassette interface. It didn't really matter about the slow speed since it only had 1k of RAM..

We only had an old cassette player and had to twiddle the volume knob to get just the right level for it to save and load successfully. Get the save volume wrong? You ain't getting that data back..

Re: This "sounds" like a great antidote for nostalgia!

Ugh! I'll take a pass on cassette nostalgia

Likewise. They had their place (buy a record, first play involved recording it to cassette. Use tape until the flutter/wow/breakup got too bad, throw tape away then re-record).

Helped stop the vinyl getting damaged (I hated the crackling noises) and, in most circumstances, the environment was noisy enough to not worry about the quality loss from the tape. Even using 'metal' tapes (and a player with the appropriate bias settings) only made it tolerable.

Then came the Sony Minidisc - which was an improvement in that the media was a lot more durable (and didn't have the tendency to get wrapped round the tape rollers if the weather was a bit too warm) but Sony, being Sony, decided to ensure that the functionality was limited by their pathetic attempt at managing the number of copies you could make [1].

And then there was MP3. Encoded at sufficiently high bitrates (and using VBR once it was available) gave sufficient working quality to the music (if you had the storage).

I'll ignore portable CD players - very rare and not entirely usable. I did have a Sony Discman (plus a pseudo-cassette interface for plugging it into a car cassette player) but using it in the car was fairly painful, especially on indifferent rural roads (it didn't handle sudden shocks well despite the damping).

No - nostalgia can stay in the past. Vinyl? Fragile, had to be stored carefully or it got unplayable and inevitably degraded, especially if you couldn't afford the best turntables and needles.

Cassette? Also fragile, quality was poor and the cassettes themselves prone to failure.

Give me music stored in lossless format (ie FLAC), playable on any device that is capable. Especially bought from something like Bandcamp that allows you to actually own the music that you buy & download.

British Army finds a new eye in the sky after Watchkeeper woes

I hope they use Castrol R.

Hmm.. two-stroke. That lovely cloud of blue smoke when you twist the throttle and then the sight of the tree approaching at high speed when the power curve hits the 'going stratospheric' point..

Yes, I remember the old Yamaha RD250 - famed for wheeleing learners into trees because of the semi-vertical power curve once you passed a certain revs.. The RD350 was worse but wasn't legal for learners when I was a nipper. And, by the time I could afford a new bike, they had changed the rules so that learners could only ride a 12bhp 125cc bike.

Mine was somewhat 'lightly' restricted - a washer on the inlet and exhaust manifolds to restrict fuel flow. A set of washers that, mysteriously, seemed to be quite volatile and wear away quite quickly.

"File marks on the washers constable? Dunno how that happened - must have been when the shop serviced it!"

(I kept the old washers and just replaced them when required - bike services, presenting the bike at the police station after being caught doing silly speeds on the country roads..)

Digital sovereignty is real in Europe. The UK? Not so much

Re: Sadly

That is a Red Sea/Moses event if ever I saw one

ITYM King Canute and the English Channel..

(Wanders off whistling 'Can-Utility and the Coastliners' irritatingly slightly off-key)

Re: Not just their golden pensions

but their post civil-service directorships.

Hey Nick Clegg... I'm looking at you for starters.

Err.. Clegg was never a Civil Servant. He was a Government minister..

(Not to say that there isn't an element of cross-fertilisation between senior civil servants and industry!)

Re: we are too tied into M$

but also civil service just going along with this without any objection

*Sigh*.

Not this again. It's not like the Civil Service have any realistic option of objecting or demurring. It exists to carry out the will of Parliament as expressed by the Crown Ministers.

Just what is you beef with the CS anyway? Annoyed that our pittance of a wage is balanced by a good pension? Irritated at your thought that civil servants 'have a job for life' (once maybe, certainly not now) or annoyed because one refused you planning permission or allowed a parking fine to go through?

Whatever the cause, it's fairly tedious. And makes you look like a Reform voter.

Google meets the neighbors and gets both barrels over its new UK datacenter

Re: It is our own fault

Oh, and FSCK all ads. I never buy anything that is advertised to me. I've been doing that since 2010

I haven't seen one since adblockers became a Thing

Talking smack about a doctor got him access to private medical files

Re: "your mother tounge is obviously not English"

Englishman here, mid 50's

Yoof. Also English, early 60's

Definitely was used in my yoof in that there Lunnon. Might be a London thing, imported from the USA?

Latest Musk merch drop runs entirely on child labor

dead cat bounce coming for tsla, or maybe just a dead cat

Oi! We'll have none of that talk round 'ere m'boy!

Re: Ahhh balance bikes...

stabiliser wheels

Stabiliser wheels? *stabiliser wheels*?

Pah. We had no such luxuries when I was a wee nipper in the early 1970s. My first bike was a somewhat pre-disastered 1950's model that my dad bought from a neighbour for a quid or two. It's still had push-rod brakes and a frame that weighed as much as a small car.

He pushed my around on it for about an hour then patted me on the back and said 'off you go'.

I was seven. And didn't fall off once although several local clumps of bushes did have suspicious areas of broken twigs when they assisted me stopping.

Yoof of today eh? Don't know how good they have it.

OpenAI admits GPT-5.6 occasionally deletes files – but it's an 'honest mistake'

So just like a real human politician then? :)

There. All fixed.

Brit Scattered Spider duo handed tickets to prison over Transport for London attack

Does every wannabe cracker/hacker/skript-kiddie..

.. have really, really, catastrophically bad facial hair?

I mean - I get the facial hair - I haven't shaved for 30+ years but at least I can actually grow it. Not just look like I spread adhesive over my face than then rolled in barber-chair sweepings.

They give beardies everywhere a bad name!

LegacyHive: 'Bone-shattering' zero-day from Microsoft's serial tormentor not the haymaker that was promised

Re: Really?

A security hole in WIndows isn't really news. And, as the fine article says, it's not really exploitable unless you already have a foothold.

Software bloat? This elevator needs an 8 GB Core i5

"The City of Light" or perhaps "The City of Love"

.. or, for those of us with functioning noses, "The City of the Stench".

Possibly the worst-smelling city I've ever been to in Europe.

Musk promises purge after Grok Build caught sending entire repos to the cloud

Re: Now hang in

And when Elon "yes I'm lying because my lips are moving" Musk said that everything uploaded will be "deleted immediately" what he meant was "we've already copied it to our training data so we don't need your uploaded copy now. Brewhahaha!"

It's entirely possible that I'm far too cynical. It's also entirely possible that I'm not cynical enough..

Microsoft is losing the battle to protect license lucre. It better get used to the feeling

Re: [IBM PC] "was barely more than Intel data sheets made flesh."

Which is why, after their early attempts, they tried to move over to the MCA architecture - if you wanted to make one, you *had* to license the IP from IBM since it was protected by patent.

I imagine they were hoping that "no-one got sacked for buying IBM" would apply to the PC world. Sadly for them, it didn't.

Buy an IBM PS/2 (plus all the gubbins to go with it like RAM card, token-ring network card etc etc) or buy a (much) cheaper Compaq+ethernet card? It might only be 10Base2 but it'll, mostly, get the job done. You might have to twiddle the connectors every so often and it might be as fast as molasses in Alaska at times but it was Good Enough.

Did everything the PS/2 would do at half the price.

Re: Great start, and then...

With Windows, it's long been debated as to whether Microsoft actually makes money from the licences

Probably not from licenses alone - but from (in a corporate environment) licenses+CALS (for anything that Windows talks to) they probably do make money.

CALS are the first cut-subscription revenue schemes that Microsoft came up with. Want to make the end-user pay (two or three times!) for anything they want to do, annually? Cha-Ching!

They've never managed to make Windows itself into a subscription-only thing but they have successfully monetised everything around it. Office? Yes, you *can* get a static version - it's missing some features, even with in the applications and very few people will buy it (or even download it from what used to be called MSDN) but it does exist. It's just not advertised.

Apple accuses OpenAI of stealing its core tech secrets

OpenAI? Stealing stuff

No!

(In other news, the Pope is the head of a worldwide church and bears do *everything* in the woods. And water is wet and politicians lie)