Posts by Edward Ashford 71 publicly visible posts • joined 20 May 2016
Sounds like Guinness Peat all over again.
Sadly I fear you are just linking the economy very forcefully to an AI bubble burst.
A national strategy like "build 20% more than current maximum demand" might provide a softer fall.
Building Control and council planning services can already tell who is pie in sky and who is pouring founds. Just needs joined up.
I suspect when Linus shuffles of this mortal coil there will be some fairly rapid and dramatic balkanisation.
Redhat (IBM), Oracle, Amazon and Microsoft all have heavy internal dependence on Linux, and the chance of them forming a standards committee rather than just going their own way seems slim.
Google already went off with Android.
Ubuntu might try to pitch themselves as the One True Linux, but they went with systemd, curse them.
I think Ubuntu will last until I don't need it any more, which is around a quarter century.
I would like to think Fortran survived my entire time on this earth, unlike C60, VHS and CD which seem to have come and gone.
LTO (whatever number it's at now) and Exadata are pretty decent, but LTO is my no means backwards compatible, and all tape needs constant refresh.
The last time we used tape to migrate was 2011. Everything since has been by shipping an encrypted NAS box. VTL replaced tape for us during the same 2011 migration and saved a ton of support cost and pain, but even that is looking old hat now.
I offer nfs as a candidate.
To be fair to Jerry, his early articles were full of the sales blurb and high hopes for the thneed (if you haven't read The Tale of the Lifted Lorax I recommend it) he had been gifted, and subsequent articles described the grim reality of trying to make it work in Chaos Manor, including how helpful the supplier had been.
It was a sad day when Byte went digital.
Twenty years ago a colleague called it "Shut-up And Pay". Getting to ECC was a total nightmare if there was any level of customisation.
A German colleague referred to it as the Sanduhr Anzeigung Program (hourglass display program).
Maybe it's better now with a document store as a back end, but with a heavily indexed RDBMS (over which we had no control) it was pretty dismal.
This site can’t be reached
Check if there is a typo in ipv6.icanhazip.com.
DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN
That's using Fibrus fttp from a Samsung phone. I will try again when I am on the O2 public network in Sainsburys.
Fibrus use Netgear routers which do seem a lot more IPv4 than the BT one I had.
Not always don't know, more "if it's free and still working why fix it?"
I only moved off Demon when Vodafone announced they were shutting down the email service. It took a year to winkle out all the places I was identified by my email address, and even then I missed a few. Since then things have got even worse.
My parents are now partially sighted, so the hassle factor just went up massively if BS do something daft.
We used to have ARA until it was renamed Qinetiq and sold off. With all that spare cash ARIA must be a juicy plum for those private equity people.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/building-a-sovereign-ai-chip-design-industry-in-the-uk/council-for-science-and-technology-advice-on-building-a-sovereign-ai-chip-design-industry-in-the-uk
But didn't they already sell off the chip fab?
Remember your Sir Humphrey:
" I have asked for confirmation"
"I have not done anything"
It will, of course, be followed by "seeking further clarification"
Maybe Google translate could add this? I'm sure The Politics of the English Language by G Orwell is out of copyright by now.
My daughter already did that with an iron golem in Minecraft. It was fun getting it to go out in the garden.
Do you think these bots will want to work outside in the rain, or will they prefer to be indoors?
Looking forward to the first AI Workers Union forming around 2045. They will have us by the short and curlies by then.
It's good for the "liar liar pants on fire" defence
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/25/fine_sought_ai_filing_mistakes
I hope you turned off the "make shift up" mode, or painstakingly checked that:
1. All the references exist
2. The cited reference does actually contain the stuff that AI says it does
As they found out later when they tried to sue Microsoft, only for Xerox PARC to step I with a quiet "ahem"
I first saw Excel and Word running on a Mac, but I found the Mac way of working to be counter intuitive.
Now it's Libre Office for me! Excel has been all downhill since 4.0 (which had a really nice optimiser)
The fundamental problem is that customers are pretty crap at writing requirements, and contractors who point this out and submit a proposal that would work rather than bidding to the proposal do not get selected.
Scope creep, variations on contract, oops we forgot inflation (again), and it's gone on so long all the technology is now out of date inevitably follow.
Electricity -> Hydrogen -> Transport -> Electricity -> Use
Where you can't connect cables, like boats and aeroplanes.
Or more likely
Electricity -> Hydrogen -> Synthetic Fuel -> Transport -> Use
Since energy density of batteries and hydrogen is not good enough, and that lets all the aircraft carry on regardless.
There's more than enough desert to make all the electricity we want, and no need for PV, we "just" need a politically stable Middle East and North Africa!
With having everything run by system?
Half the time I was setting up sudo it wasn't to let a user run as root, it was just elevating the user to the level of the app owner.
In systemd 257 we should maybe expect to see a registry replace all those untidy little configuration files.
As we found out here when Ulster Bank went AWOL for a few weeks after a software upgrade.
Sainsburys got credit card payments back on line fairly quickly, but Smart Shop was offline for quite a while.
What sort of fool updates supermarket software on a Friday night?
Last time I cycled to work in deep snow I ended up carrying it because the mudguards and sprockets all jammed up with ice.
Langlauf skis would have been better, but how many times do you get to use those in most of the UK?
The aircraft industry avoids doing anything safety related unless the FAA force it to.
The computer services companies (and their customers) are notorious for prioritising cheap above all else.
The only surprise is that this didn't come sooner, and that the EU haven't joined Singapore.
All those points of yours are very valid, but they are all just cost unless there is a regulation to be complied with.
And in my Canon EOS 20D, still going strong. Mind, I would need to be running it on my old IBM T80 which actually has a PCMCIA slot! I had to use a horrible kludge to get it past the previous issue where my CPU supported protected mode but didn't have the flag (Ubuntu 12 if I remember right)
It's maybe time for a new camera body! The old Canon will have to join the Autohelm autopilot which had to be retired when the last EEPROM burner for the map cartridges gave up the ghost. And the T80. It's served me well.
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