Posts by steelpillow

CISA: Wow, that election had a lot of foreign trolling. Trump's Homeland Sec pick: And that's none of your concern

Re: Kristi Noem : "Cyber agency too 'far off mission' "

ROFL >splutter!<

Re: Kristi Noem : "Cyber agency too 'far off mission' "

There is an old rule: do not destroy anything until you already have something better to put in its place.

So if CISA are forbidden from patrolling foreign interference in a sovereign nation's internal affairs, who then is going to do so?

Microsoft eggheads say AI can never be made secure – after testing Redmond's own products

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance

The whole approach misses the fact that Black Hats are developing AIs whose sole purpose is to pwn, poison or kill the White AIs. Once the White Hats grok this, they will begin developing AIs whose sole purpose is to do the same to the Black AIs.

This is just the latest chapter in the Neverending Story. spAI vs spAI. After that it'll go commercial, with AI-on-AI malware for sale on the dark web.

Debian 12.9 arrives, quickly followed by MX Linux 23.5

mate

MX sounds cool, but I don't get on with xfce and have been with MATE ever since I once tried Gnome 3. So Devuan it has been for a good few years now.

That slow update cycle? Yea, fantastic! I hate constant trashing of my carefully-honed setup. When the hardware dies is a good time to refresh my desktop, and not until.

WordPress drama latest: Leader Matt Mullenweg exiles five contributors

Mini-Musk

lol

BOFH: Forecasting and the fine art of desktop upgrades

Re: The BoFH

I have settled for the exhaust from the on-prem (because hallucination management) AI Cloud diesel-powered generator farm, an interim measure until we can stop those wind turbines on the roof from falling over. Gives a whole new meaning to the AI Cloud!

Look for the label: White House rolls out 'Cyber Trust Mark' for smart devices

Nation Institute of Shattered Trust

The NIST note that an IoT device may need to connect back to a cloud service or something before it can actually work.

Users will assume that the Trust mark applies to that service.

But not for long....

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Re: pot?

> "files" _are a metaphor_

Only if you have been smoking the propaganda Woodbines.

Most words in computing are metaphors in that sense. It's how we build our vocabulary of understanding; the metaphor is used as a label for a specific technical construct. Please show me a real "cloud", a real "mouse", a stored "image" that is not just a string (sic) of bits (sic). If you want to see a real filesystem, go find an old library that still uses Dewey card indexing. Metaphor my arse! Using such an argument to diss virtual filesystems - or anything else for that matter - is just semantic handwaving.

Re: All I will say is this...

I am a professional Technical Author, qualified in Business French, and have translated various minor French texts into English. Etc.

STE - Simplified Technical English - is defined in one giant cockroach-crusher (ASD-STE100. Joy unbounded) yet barely resembles most of what we techies all say to each other.

French is a significantly more minimalist language, with both simpler grammar and smaller vocabulary, carefully if pompously regulated by the Academie Francaise. It doesn't need to be simplified.

Re: English is one of the easiest human languages

A significant amount of English has Latin and Greek origins. Besides the church Latin of the medieval period, which we also imported indirectly by way of French, the Victorians tried hard to crush English grammar into the Latin model, and promoted many words deriving from Classical vocabulary and spelling. Much of that still hangs around today, in one form or another.

Old English was already a mashup of Celtic, old Norse (aka Scandinavian), Saxon/Old Frisian (aka Germanic), and the Dwarvish runes stolen from an early draft of The Lord of the Rings.

Re: pot?

The original MacOS tried desperately to hide the filesystem, so you just clicked arrays of icons to do stuff. Despite a neat and elegant feel, I found it unusable.

Today's MS Office 365 SharePoint collaboration space does much the same, only for neat and elegant read chaotic and shite.

Did you ever try controlling a nuclear power station with a ZX Spectrum?

A generation of gray-haired IT folks

So what colour hair do those of us have, who learned computing in the 1960s?

Re: pot? - calling the kettle?

Line numbers and GOTOs are - or ought to be - an option to use like any other tool. I started out on punched cards. When the technician dropped all our homework in a heap on the floor, I was one of two in the class who had numbered our cards and could get all the lines back in the right order. We were also the only two who ever got our code to run. Later, moving from ZX BASIC to a procedural SAM BASIC, I pretty much stopped using GOTOs. I'd use it occasionally within a procedure, sometimes to the line number and sometimes to a label, whichever suited the structure at that point. It also had line renumbering where you could specify the step size. I'd frequently renumber to a step of 10. Inserting an extra line just meant typing out the number and the code, and hitting return. Need more than ten inserting? Just RENUM 10 again. No need to think ahead, no need to highlight with a cursor or scroll to bring the location into view. Nowadays it is mostly the occasional shell script, my text editor has optional line number display but is altogether more user-friendly than a terminal display and I almost never turn on numbering.

But a power cut before I can take a non-volatile copy is still as pissing as ever, even if I am just trying to get python to say "Hello world".

Really?

Not sure how much of that I agree with.

This old fool was once a beginner. Everything got saved to media on principle, weeks before any of us got enough bugs out that it would actually run. When I got my own cheapo Science of Cambridge Mk.14, the lack of non-volatile storage made it almost useless as a beginner's tool.

Then there was Mallard BASIC, a particularly fast implementation optimised for business applications, including filesystems and databases. Ran on CP/M if you booted an Amstrad PCW from the other disc. Also on the Amstrad-owned Speccys and the BBC Micro if you plugged in the Z80 option.

And SAM BASIC, which did procedures and smart auto-renumbering (also updating the GOTOs for example) and all kinds of other Advanced Good Things. You could compile it too, with a BLITZ compile function so chunks of your code ran like hot shit (if you had designed it properly, as always!). I used it as a poor man's FORTRAN.

I suspect that the "BASIC is crap" mantra came about because an entire generation suddenly wanted 16/32 bit boxen, and dissing everything from the 8-bit era was a prerequisite. Some guru peddling his own 16/32-bit shit just happened to provide the quote everybody wanted to hear. There was certainly never anything rational behind it, at least I agree there.

Christmas 1984: The last hurrah for 8-bit home computers

Elephants in the room

The Amstrad PCW arrived in 1985 and blew new life into the 8-bit era. Unlike the IBM PC it was affordable, approachable and bundled with a printer. It kept the 8-bit era alive for a good few more years by pretty much creating the SOHO market for IT.

>"However, [Acorn's] grip on UK schools loosened as parents wondered about the point of having the company's computers in classrooms while the IBM PC and its compatibles were beginning to dominate the workplace."

Not really: a) see above, and b) Acorn faced the choice - develop the BBC Micro beyond the Master series, or swerve to an ARM architecture too expensive for the average classroom, they could not afford to do both. So they took the RISC (Sorree!), leaving the education market fractured and chaotic until secondhand obsolescent 186s got dumped wholesale on the market.

Humanoid robots coming soon, initially under remote control

Generative feedback

This could be the turning point. To date, AIs have had little or no control over what happens after they spit something out. Robots which learn basic motor skills like a baby have been fundamentally unintelligent. A generative AI controlling a robot will spit out purposeful movements, and suddenly gets the chance to learn from its mistakes in a far more meaningful way.

However, the next couple of years will likely reveal yet another layer of sophistication to be missing - but what?

China's homebrew Bluetooth alternative is on the march as Beijing pushes universal remotes

Does the S is Starflash stand for SystemD?

From IR remote to Bluetooth to WiFi to 5G and streaming audio, my this Star Flash has attitude!

Why the f*** would I want a handset to do all that? I mean, my smartphone already does it all, except for the IR remote bit. And it runs apps full of adware and spyware as well.

Oh, wait....

systemd begrudgingly drops a safety net while a challenger appears, GNU Shepherd 1.0

Re: "There is an effort to do that total rewrite"

> to rewrite something someone else didn't like (or thought he could do better)

Yes, this is absolutely why I have stayed on Linux for the last several decades. Tried and trusted stuff suddenly works even better, I don't find it pulled and replaced by some dumb "smart" shit all the time.

And if some retard does try that trick on me, there's always the forks of what just works - like Devuan from Debian, and MATE from GNOME 2. I just wish someone would fork a Firefox that defaults to Classic skin.

Submarine cable resilience board announced on same day maybe-cut-by-China Baltic cable repaired

Re: Bah!

Drones, man! Gotta be AI drones. Those lasers should be able to cut the Russian's blockchains as well.*

* Hey, how do they make 'em out of blocks anyway? I suppose someone put all the links on the Internet, so they had to figure something else. Superglue?

Telco security is a dumpster fire and everyone's getting burned

1+1=2

Which is why anybody with pretence to understanding 1+1=2 maintains their own privacy safeguards according to need, such as VPNs, encrypted protocols like https, keeping a special no-credit account for Internet shopping, etc. etc.

And will always need to. "But we have to leave the [ID/location data of choice] open, so the network can route it", etc. etc. Yeah, just like TOR does.

Personally, if I had anything sensitive to send, I'd steg it into a yet another piccie of my cute cat, post it on social media, and good luck to the Chinese/Russians/North Koreans/CIA sucking it out of the shit ocean.

Both KDE and GNOME to offer official distros

Re: Linux is like car clubs

A guy walks into a Ford showroom.

"I want a new car"

"Certainly Sir, what model?"

"Shit, I dunno, you tell me, you're the salesman!"

"You look like a cool dude, Sir. We have the latest Focus ST just in with all the coolest updates."

"Uh... If you say so."

"Okay, now what colour would you like? We have total red, green metalflake and silver bullet in stock."

"Oh, F*** you! Ford offer just too much choice!!!!!!"

Re: Number of Linux distributions soon to exceed number of Linux users

At last! A use for AI!

"Spin me up a Linux distro with [my fave shit and not my top hates]"

I mean, be honest, are you capable of writing a Gentoo config file?

Treebeard

"Haters gonna hate, forkers gonna fork"

"Total rewrites are famously one of the Things You Should Never Do."

"One of the single most-heard complaints outsiders have about the world of Linux distributions is that there are too many of them."

>COUGH!< SystemD >COUGH!<

Interesting parallel case, here. SystemD hijacked Debian OS for its own (among others), so the SysV et al. crowd forked off Devuan for their own. Distrowatch currently rates it at No. 42, just below slackware.

The Devuan developers put a lot of effort into maintaining compatibiltiy with the Debian stack, but inevitably some tool and app developers take sides and the SystemD Total Rewrite refuses to die. Devuan has to fork some of them, just to maintain itself.

Whatever way this goes, it is an object lesson for all to study before hastily ignoring Treebeard's advice. Unless, as in Devuan's case, somebody has already been cutting down your forest.

NASA's X-59 plane is aiming for a sonic thump, not a boom

Platypus

One intriguing feature of the X-59 is its Platypus style nose: looks like a needle from the side, but more like an ice lolly stick or duck's bill from above and below. My guess is that this allows the needle-look taper to be more slender, reducing the shock at the tip. Also, like the chines on the Lockheed Blackbird, the faster it flies the better it gets at generating lift, to help compensate for the rearward shift of the CL at supersonic speeds. So why, then does the thing sprout two tail surfaces and a canard? "Just spreading the booms, Sire"?

Talking of booms, we should remember that as the plane flies higher, the ground pressure falls. A low-flying Eurofighter will create a louder boom at ground level than a bigger but higher-flying Concorde. The higher you fly, the more time the booms have to merge together and defeat the magic of the X-59 boom massage. Fortunately, it also fades with distance. So boom management is more about allowing a plane to go supersonic at lower altitudes and over more populated areas, thus making it more economic to operate.

Also. the layer of "We're dealing with it" technobabble enables the industry to overcome the environmental hate hype inherited from the Richard Wiggs (UK), not-invented-here (US) and indignation (Rest of World) era of the last century. This is probably the most significant aspect of the whole programme.

AI Jesus is ready to dispense advice from a booth in historic Swiss church

Re: Saved!

That's what I love about puns and sausages, the best ones are always the wurst.

Re: Saved!

Worst pun of the week award!

Replacing one half of the human-human interaction

Had you been born a Druid, you would have made the same claim about the impersonality of books. They insisted on rote learning and word-of-mouth, and refused to write anything down.

The early Church did not allow images of God in its art. He did not appear until the Renaissance - Michaelangelo was not the first, but he was certainly the first to have Papal blessing. A similar story occurred with images of the Buddha (though of course Islam remains adamant about its own Prophet to this day).

The translation of the Bible from sacred Latin to profane local languages such as English earned another burst of theological condemnation and burning at the stake. Similarly, the Hebrew Old Testament and Arabic Qu'ran have their dedicated dogmatists.

Even within my living memory, portraying Jesus on film was deemed blasphemous, and the first to do so had to remain underground.

AIJesus is in good company.

Re: Not the messiah, just a very naughty LLM

Upvote and beer in loving memory of Graham Chapman.

But you are not quite right about their respective "god". Usually it is the stories told by and about their respective prophet. For example Judaism, Christianity and Islam all share the same god (just called different names in different languages). Many religions are even named after their prophet - Christianity, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and Confucianism come to mind. And Buddhism doesn't have any gods anyway.

How long before the first inevitable sect claiming AIJesus as the living Messiah pops up? After all, as the crowd around Brian declared, the fact that he up-front denied it proves his modesty and authenticity beyond doubt.

DoJ wants Google to sell off Chrome and ban it from paying to be search default

Forcing Google to compete on the quality of its search engine again would be nice. Serve Apple and Mozilla right for drinking the bribery kool-aid, sure, but what I really want to take a dive is the way so many "independent" search engines just aggregate Google, Bing and a shedload of other Google+Bing aggregators. Let Google suffer and either all those circular idiots will stop aggregating what nobody wants any more, or Google will get their act together and become worth aggregating again.

Meanwhile, I treasure truly independent engines such as Mojeek. Long may their databases grow. Hey, all you aggregators out there, ya listenin'?

Photoshop FOSS alternative GNU Image Manipulation Program 3.0 nearly here

Re: Ah, GIMP

> I still remember the one time I had to draw a bunch of arrows pointing to stuff.

I use Inkscape for anything more precise than a rough sweep of the pencil. When happy, export as png with transparent background, open GIMP and drop png over bitmap. If not quite right, tweak vector source and repeat. "Drawing" on a bitmap is a lazy and dangerous shortcut, serves you right.

This is welcome news. I use GIMP a fair bit for retouching and enhancing dodgy images. I still get lost when some box or other disappears from where it has been for the last three years because I accidentally hit some arbitrary control combo I shouldn't have. What is the toy called? How the f*** can I search for its recovery spell if I don't know which spell to search for? Will be nice to get past all that at last.

AI poetry 'out-humans' humans as readers prefer bots to bards

It means what you want it to mean

Agreed. Coming to the fore through the 1950-70s, there was/is a stream-of-altered-consciousness culture which produced a mass of incoherent art, literature, poetry, music lyrics, politics, mysticism and on and on. Basically we were trying to churn out generative ML+LLM output by studiously /not/ thinking about it.

I have to say, on occasion the results were stunning and I have my favourites among abstract art, prog rock lyrics - and even poetry. But no, by far the mass of it was sloppily-executed "It means what you want it to mean" AI mimicry. No wonder today's competent AIs can do it better.

Mozilla's Firefox browser turns 20. Does it still matter?

AIUI it is more Chromium with the overlaid Google Chrome spyware layer replaced by an MS Edge spyware layer.

Levels and playing fields

A good point about the distinction between the tool and the traffic. But, as the current controversy over social media content shows, the tool dictates how the content behaves. A tool without a safety guard will always get abused in the wrong hands.

We insist on the right to free speech, but are forced to censor what is too destructive. We need too to insist on the right to free media, but to censor functionality which is too destructive. A rare example of the EU being ahead of the pack.

You don't need Chrome dominance, you just need every motherfucking sitebuilder on the planet to throw Google's javascript and captcha resources into every template.

Why I code my sites 100% in a text editor.

SpaceX Dragon gives ISS a helping hand with altitude

Re: Too much delta-V required

No need for geo. Way back in 1971 the UK's first satellite, Prospero was launched by a Black Arrow into what is classed as LEO. It is not expected to deorbit until around 2070. You don't need to nudge the ISS that much to get it into a similarly medium-term-stable orbit.

Museum piece - good. Refurbishment - well, wanna pay for blasting all that fungicide into orbit, followed by all that toxic-fungicide neutralizer?

The NPU: Neural processing unit or needless pricey upsell?

Re: What does an NPU actually do?

Was wondering the same thing. Some kind of shonky hardware almost-a-neural net or something?

Reaction Engines' hypersonic hopes stall as funding fizzles out

Re: They were always so bad at funding.

Nothing to do with Whittle or R-R either. In the UK, only Metrovick were working on axial at that time - for that very reason.

Re: They were always so bad at funding.

Certainly don't believe that. Whittle's designs were horrendously overcomplicated, with the air actually flowing forward through the combustion cans in a misguided bid to keep the engine as short as possible. Didn't take Rover long to come up with a slightly longer straight-through design they could actually manufacture. I think R-R inherited both at different stages of development.

Re: They were always so bad at funding.

Not so, my Internet-scraping friend. May I refer you to "Vikings at Waterloo" by Davis S. Brooks and published by the Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust.

Power Jets was deemed a research outfit and Whittle was forced to subcontract the actual metal-bashing. The initial contractor was British Thomson-Houston (BTH). When relations turned sour, it was Whittle who approached Rover through personal contact. However because Whittle was a serving RAF officer, his patent belonged to the Ministry and this gave them complete control. At first they refused, but eventually did an about-face and let the manufacturing contract for Whittle's next prototype directly to Rover, behind Whittle's back after he had laid plans to make it himself. Rover in turn subcontracted the difficult bits - the fuel system and combustion chamber - to Lucas.

In the end the jet engine was not Rover's core business and they were only too glad to do a swap with R-R for a more familiar internal combustion engine.

However the dream did not die and over the 20 years or so after the war they made the world's first gas turbine powered car and a couple of follow-ups.

Re: Second time around

There has never been a SABRE engine prototype. You may be thinking of the HTX intake pre-cooler tests, in which a regular jet engine was used to simulate high-Mach intake conditions for the HTX. An entire test facility was built specially for the job, in the US.

Re: Reluctant to commit to more funding

Although the only reason to buy it up is to make sure it dies. Why develop an expensive advance when you can harvest more beans by sticking with today's tech?

Re: Second time around

Was the same Alan Bond - he started Reaction Engines to develop the tech after HOTOL collapsed. And it collapsed for exactly the same reason: BAe and R-R were both in there but canned any further investment. Eventually, they came back on board Reaction Engines, but now they're off again. What a bunch of yoyos!

That position you just applied for might be a 'ghost job' that'll never be filled

Re: Who says anyone got interviewed?

I got a fake interview once. The interviewer left me waiting and turned up 15 mins late, clutching a CaffPow. Her colleague had another on her desk but was more interested in her fingernails. Didn't offer me one, the whole time (a CaffPow, not a finger, you animal!). Luckily the office was a drab grey cubicle hell and I'd just heard from an acquaintance they were a bunch of pointy-haired Dilbert fodder, so I felt no loss. So I whiled away the time telling them an anecdote about how I had once shafted my managers to get the job done. That actually got Colleague to lift her eyes from her fingernails and glance triumphantly at Interviewer: proof I was not a team player!

Tle Law is A Ass

"intended for internal applicants and only opened to the public for legal purposes"

Fucking timewasters, these lawmakers. Allow lusers to be the product, drown internal promotion in bureaucracy.

SuperHTML is here to rescue you from syntax errors, and it's FOSS

Why anyone needs lamp stacks, scripting languages or sql

Back in the day, clicky buttons required either semi-absolutely-positioned clicky transparent overlays or javascript OnMouseover stuff. Nowadays CSS handles that, but is still very bad at drop-down navigation menus. If you wanted reusable page content, to save pushing out that same nav menu on /every/ page, framesets were your friend. But they did not do stateful bookmarking, so instead of fixing http for that they killed framesets and substituted loads of crap. iframes are about the best left, but still pigs. To make these things user-frendly, you still need scripting.

I guess that if you want things like a site search feature or an email toy which hides your address, then LAMP+SQL would be handy.

So sites like yours and mine are pretty limited in the user experience we can offer.

"In a distant and better-forgotten era"

Nope. I still do it today. I maintain a moderate-sized 100% static website using the text editor of the moment - currently MATE's Pluma. HTML, CSS and that's your lot. Code highlighting but not code completion. Sheesh, how I hate smart "completion" algorithms, they so get in the way.

Back in the day, tools like the text-based Arachnophilia and the multi-mode HoTMetaL Pro added valuable productivity, but nothing today matches up to them. In particular, HoTMetaL Pro offered a "Tags-on" semi-WYSIWYG mode which was invaluable for cleaning up copy-paste muddles and the like. Just enough completion to close containers in a dumb, predictable way, and easy as pie to drag-and-drop stuff in and out if it got the closing location wrong. Seamonkey Composer is the only F/LOSS tool I know which still offers tags-on, but that is still stuck in a half-baked and buggy transition to CSS and HTML3/4.

A closer look at Intel and AMD's different approaches to gluing together CPUs

Don't forget the infamous Intel Pentium II. Chip set with integral heatsink. The thing was edge-mounted in card guides, to save motherboard space. On a tower PC it was so heavy the guides sagged and it fell out, we had to ty-rap all ours in.