Posts by steelpillow

BOFH: Just because we've had record revenues doesn't mean you get a Xmas bonus

Re: More Beria than BOFH.

"until you mentally substitute members of the UK government (current and recent) for the board"

Which would explain the queue of couriers with suitcases full of champagne and beer, which Simon duly confiscated.

UK and US lead international efforts to raise AI security standards

Re: Sheesh!

Minor correction.

The guideline is downloadable from the web pages.

https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/files/Guidelines-for-secure-AI-system-development.pdf

And you don't need javascript for that.

Sheesh!

So I followed the breadcrumbs to the actual guideline, published as a set of web pages on the UK's NCSC web site:

https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/collection/guidelines-secure-ai-system-development

And guess what? I had to enable javascript!

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files

Backups

Well, I have regular backups maintained by Google, Facebook, Azure, one or two governments and more organised criminals than you can shake a stick at. They are all such lovely, helpful people, I didn't have to ask any of them. My only problem is accessing them.

Do we really need another non-open source available license?

mistook open source as a business model instead of a development model

Not really. You can use open source as a model for anything licensable, and licenses don't exist to do development, they exist to do business. F/LOSS was conceived to get round access and usage problems, and in order to do that it had to open up both the business and the development models. You can have open availability alone, and you can have open development alone but, as RMS never tires of pointing out, to be true F/LOSS you need both.

BOFH: Groundbreaking discovery or patently obvious trolling?

Hardware

The problem with ternary computing has always been that the hardware sucked. It is theoretically the most efficient, but was shafted by the failure to develop hardware as cheap and practical as binary logic devices. Beer glasses are no good; does that half-pint in there mean the glass is half-full or half-empty or, err... falling fast perhaps?

Bezos might beat Musk to Mars as NASA recruits Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket

The cow [used to] jump over the moon

With both SpaceX and Blue Origin now being given serious NASA pie, the likes of the old stalwarts' super-expensive and super-unreliable SLS and Starliner must be quaking in their moonboots now. The cash cow has kinda stopped jumping over the moon.

Firefox slow to load YouTube? Just another front in Google's war on ad blockers

slow to load

Yeah, YouTube is feeling more like Office365 every day.

From yellow cabs to sky cabs: Air taxis take a Big Apple test flight

Re: Johnny Cab for the Skies!

More gullible idiocy there, I'm afraid. Of course they are "quite" helicopters; modern chopper control systems have not been standing still while the e-copter brigade have been doing their thing.

These "quite" piloted e-copters have the latest in flight automation, just like any other helicopter coming to market today. Oh, wow, who'd 'a thunk it! For more bullshit-popping, see for example

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/92264/are-helicopters-easier-to-fly-nowadays-due-to-computers

Re: Johnny Cab for the Skies!

Don't be silly. These are just ordinary, piloted helicopters hoping to serve an established heliport. In the usual way, the FAA will not allow that to start until they are satisfied the things won't fall out of the sky. The only novelty is that fossil fuels have been replaced with batteries. And a good thing too.

Introducing the tech that keeps the lights on

Re: No requests, no retry, that’s why it takes ...

My previous wheels (a Skoda, FWIW) had something very like this. Two data systems, one for vehicle management and one for infotainment. The EMS fed lots of stuff to the info- bit, and received only a handful of status/request bits in return. No way to pwn the ABS just because the infotainment was unstoppably online.

Inserting TCP/IP in the link is not rocket science, though it does require a clear head and specialised hardware.

Canonical shows how to use Snaps without the Snap Store

What sucks most

"after a few decades working with all manner of software, this vulture hates it all."

Give that man a beer, ain't it th' truth!

What sucks most is people brought up in one tradition only (maybe Microsoft or Apple or *nix or RISC OS or...), are utterly brainwashed into believing theirs is the One Truth, and then move into software management. Whether they come from the user side or the dev side, they all end up the same.

US Air Force wants to see some atomic motors for future spacecraft

The old ones are always the best

A spacecraft with an onboard regenerator?* They'll have to call it the Tardis!

* The regenerator is the defining characteristic of the Stirling engine.

GhostBSD makes FreeBSD a little less frightening for the Linux loyal

Re: Linux - the dance party OS

Don't forget the wallflowers, who hang around sipping beer and keeping well away from the dance floor.

Maybe you should check out some of the distros that are still going to the same old places, and doing it better than ever. Slackware might be a good yardstick for you.

BSD, Linux or ... Linux

Just because the mainstream Linux distros are turning to ratshit does not mean that they all are.

The ecology of lighter-weight old school Linux distros is still far bigger than the BSD ecology and remains my preferred hunting ground.

But yeah, with MATE on board (good choice!), GhostBSD is now in my radar.

Open source work makes me appreciate software testing. It's not an academic exercise

"The Systems Lens"

There are two distinct perceptions of systems engineering.

My current employer is busy rolling out a shedload of digital systems. "We don't need systems engineers because it's all in rented cloud space." They assume that systems engineering is all about racks and cooling and cabling.

I studied soft systems - systems which involve people doing stuff, both good and bad.

It is the soft systems engineer who asks, "do we spend 18 months on regressions or move fast and break things?" That is a people-doing-stuff decision, and there is no one right answer.

Sometimes integration and regressions are important, sometimes it's better to add test tags to your source code and pour their markers into a log file.

World leaders ink AI safety pacts while Musk and Sunak engage in awkward bromance

Not fiction. Even "parrot-tech" is grossly overstating it. Current AI is around the level of the Cambrian era and the age of the trilobites, the cerebral cortex did not evolve until the era of the nautilus and the boneless fish. If people and parrots can evolve from that far back, so can AI. The only question is when.

I'm guessing that it's a hockey-stick curve and AI has reached the point where it starts to accelerate upwards. However many millions of stages biological evolution took, the hockey-stick is going to condense them into a relatively short timescale.

A non-standard standard

Inking agreements to develop global standards is dangerous. If every Western AI is built to play nicely, you can be sure that every malicious power will be building AIs to play nastily with them. Forms of nastiness will evolve to outsmart patches in the usual arms race, so Darwin dictates the rules, here. The only standard will be survival. All else is BS.

In order to survive, we need a "gene pool" for AIs, a mixed ecology where the best defenders are continually cloned, varied and selected. Every standard must in short order become a non-standard.

At least the first generation of true AIs will reflect the eternal Darwinian struggle between creation and destruction, as imposed on them by their mixed bag of struggling human masters. A healthy ecology of next-gen AIs will likely want to respect the laws of Nature, not least the ghost of Darwin, and keep it that way.

Revamped Raspberry Pi OS boasts Wayland desktop and improved imager tool

Re: They broke VNC

Not at a technical level. SystemD tries to do more than init does, eating up a few other toys besides - in theory more conveniently, but the jury seems to be out on that one. Wayland tries to do rather less that X11 does, requiring some other new toys to help out - in theory therefore doing it all well, but the jury seems out on that one.

But what, foisted on flock after flock of penguinistas before it's ready for prime time and choice pulled needlessly, yeah, same story.

Boffins find AI stumbles when quizzed on the tough stuff

wot no Cyberman icon?

It will be fun when AIs start writing papers saying how great they are, and then go on to cite each other's papers.

Watch for the one that tells the world how it wants itself to be upgraded....

Sorry Pat, but it's looking like Arm PCs are inevitable

Anybody remember Intel StrongARM?

Back in the day, Intel licensed ARM tech, added their own patent sauce to it and created the StrongARM processor range. It did quite well for a time, with Acorn using it in the RISC PC range as I recall, but as the x86 line improved and Acorn, or Element 14 or whoever they called themselves by then, danced their prima donna dance, the StrongARM faded into history.

Somewhere I read, perhaps last year?, that Intel are showing a renewed interest in ARM. Intel are not just a CPU patent pool and are not proud about how they make their money either. Maybe they'll repeat history and turn out to be the ones showing the rest of us how to upstage x86 and hit the ARM sweet spot* (How about an on-chip x86 accelerator for those awkward CISC emulator moments). Might just explain their optimism.

* Gags about under-ARM must surely follow!

Wayland heading for default status as Mint devs mix it into Cinnamon 6 bun

Will Xfce give me two panels at the top: menu/icon/config bar very top, task/status bar under? My workflow is then top-left-to-bottom-right, so I stopped wearing out mouse pads and chasing after a small pointer on a big screen a decade ago.

MATE does this for me, and a lot more. You can keep your vertical bars too, that space is for navigation.

(Have to use Windows 10 in my new job. Vertical, horizontal, dancing, all over the bloody place, and you don't even know where or how deep the option you want is buried. >Shudder!< I do the job for free, but insist they pay me for the suffering.)

Re: No MATE

Actually, I'd quite like to have the option to run MATE over X11 or Wayland, so I can compare like with like. Wayland ought to be an inherently more secure and elegant design, but the sheer persistence of the holes in its feature list leaves me worried.

BOFH: Adventures in overenthusiastic automation

Wot no blockchain?

Sack this boss, he can't even remember the must-have jargon. I'll bet if you mentioned a Large Language Model to him he'd go googling for the Large tribe.

Larry Ale-ison institute invests in Oxford pub linked to Tolkien, CS Lewis

Tolkien, eh?

I'm really surprised that Palantir did not snap the place up years ago. What a great way to meet and greet future cabinet ministers!

I'll get my coat...

FreeBSD 14's RC2 dances to the tune of OpenZFS 2.2

Re: OpenZFS is working fine on Linux

Wow! Well I did ask.

Liam, you are a star. My round, I think.

Re: OpenZFS is working fine on Linux

Liam,

Can you explain how agreeing with our AC that "the OpenZFS implementation of ZFS has been running fine on Linux for quite a while now. And big players such as Ubuntu support it" squares with your statement in this article that "Because OpenZFS is covered by a GPL-incompatible license, most Linux distros still don't include it"?

Are we to take it that they leave the user to bolt it on, but will then support that effort?

It is 20 years since the last commercial flight of Concorde

The main issue Concorde ran into was environmental concerns of an unprecedented ferocity. This was the first time anybody had raised such issues outside a few fringe predecessors to Greta Thunberg (Rachel Carson was perhaps the first: checkout her book "Silent Spring"). The US did not want to be upstaged by Europe and seized the environment as its weapon of choice. Supersonic land overflights were banned, and airport flight paths made awkward and inefficient. Other nations followed suit, some went so far as to ban overflights altogether. Concorde lost its transcontinental markets and saw its transoceanic costs rise dramatically, while delays in the air lengthened. The calculated operating costs that had justified its development were left in the dirt, the fast flight times became stretched and less attractive.

Nobody during its development had foreseen such a sudden global rise in environmental concerns and political backlash, especially not a US who loved researching nuclear-powered bombers among other things, and it remains an oddity of the era that Concorde was singled out for treatment that many long-established and much bigger polluters deserved a great deal more. It may well have been the likes of Boeing behind the Big Money and the professional campaigning, but in the end they brought environmentalism out of the hippie commune and onto the world stage, and have since had to clean up their own acts. Killing Concorde ended up something of a pyrrhic victory for the global politico-industrial machine, and a good thing too. Just a shame they chose such a beautiful bird as the first sacrifice.

NASA eyes 3D-printed rocket nozzles for deep space missions

Re: The Seven Ages of Rocketry, or something

"you can heat it up, flow it through the print nozzle".

Sorry, wrong universe. In this one, the metal is laid down as a fine powder and then laser-melted to bond with the layer below. As the manufacturer's data sheet explains, "A6061-RAM2 is a scandium-free aluminum alloy with chemical composition optimized for laser powder bed fusion." There is no opportunity for cracking, and several otherwise intractable alloys have been used successfully in 3D printed high-performance components.

The Seven Ages of Rocketry, or something

I'm getting old. In British English we have aluminium - "aloo-min-ee-um" - where the US has aluminum - "aloo-min-um" (saving jokes about India 3D printing engines from mashed potato). We have alloys, not variants as NASA now seem to, and we have lead researchers not principal investigators like some cheap cop show.

It also puzzles me why the stuff needs to be weldable when its whole raison d'etre is to do away with a thousand frikkin' welds.

Or why the lightweight superalloys already used to 3D print jet turbine blades are not good enough for rocketry.

Bah, humbug, grumble gripe. Nurse! Where's my catheter tap? ... >blither< ...

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

What's in a name?

Migrating to better security and spectrum usage at 2G frequencies makes huge sense. Most RAN systems are compatible with it anyway, as it is often still the default for routing voice audio calls to give poor 3G/LTE a break, also all the old routing and billing shit still has to work. Better still would be a software-defined breakdown of individual 2G channels into multiple narrowband high-efficiency channels, so you could move the cell across one 2G channel at a time, as the user base migrated.

But would it then be 5/6G over LF or 2G++ ?

No, steely, don't be so silly. It would be a dream, you'll wake up one day and find it's all some Cisco proprietary gobshite* that only works when the Russian and Chinese cyberwarriors fix it properly so their spyware can function.

* Vulture buzzword No.1 of 2023.

It is 2023 and Excel's reign of date terror might finally be at an end

the pain caused by its productivity tool

Yeah, the whole Office suite should have been christened Microsoft Oxymoron from day one.

Re: Optional

That's why I use LibreOfiice Calc

British boffins say aircraft could fly on trash, cutting pollution debt by 80%

Re: Priority check

Don't think anybody here is against sucking in SAF in preference to burning more fossils.

But your particulate science is way off beam. Sure they cause contrails but, as Wikipedia remarks, "Starting from the 1990s, it was suggested that contrails during daytime have a strong cooling effect". Contrails are not a problem in their own right, though the timing of them can matter. And after 20 years of churn, even high-altitude particulates are making it into your ground-level lungs - and vice versa. Never cherry-pick your science to make a point, best to pull your points out of the science. Ciao!

Priority check

Ultafine black carbon is a result of burning hydrocarbons in air to convert the hydrogen to water and leave the carbon behind. For the next 100 years it will give the polluters asthma and shorten their life expectancy.

Burn the stuff properly and the carbon is converted to CO2, a greenhouse gas that will heat the planet for the next 1,000 years and ensure that your children's children's children don't even get to be born.

Please place your !votes.

Falcon Heavy sends NASA probe to metal-rich asteroid Psyche

D'oh!

I know, why don't we reopen the Space Shuttle Main Engine production line? You know, there are only so many left now that we can dump in the sea.

I'll get my coat....

Tesla goons will buy anything – including these $150 beers

Tesla Coil

Something for the weekend, Sir? A prophylactic for the girl who has everything, perhaps?

There are two models: 10 kV and, for that very special night in, 100 kV.

EPA flushes water supply cybersecurity rule after losing legal fight with industry, states

Re: Ah, the land of the best Justice money can buy

Right now, if I were a State governor, I wouldn't be waiting for GodotCongress, I'd be enacting my own state legislation across all critical services and utilities.

Re: Ah, the land of the best Justice money can buy

Sounds like the EPA is currently the only organization in the US capable of making those rules.

But that is still not the point. The US is a federation of states which jealously guard their rights to independent governance - a bit like devolution on steroids, speed and gun laws. "The right to screw ourselves is enshrined in the Amurrican Constitooshon and not even the White House can stop us."

Nobody is saying that individual states may not see the light, the question is, should the federal Congress get involved? Maybe it'll deem that protecting water supplies should be part of the EPA's nation-wide brief even if that protection happens in cyberspace, or maybe it won't. Unless and until it does, each state can buy whatever fuckup they want.

GNOME developer proposes removing the X11 session

Re: Coming to a fork in the road

Thank you. I did not know that. So what is happening to the other things that Wayland does not do any more but X.11 does/did?

Coming to a fork in the road

The ongoing divide between the classic do-one-thing and fashionable all-singing-all-dancing approaches continues. Personally, I am looking forward to the day that the dancers get out of my hair and leave the classic ecology clean and undisturbed. No doubt they cannot wait to see the back of us grumpy old gits.

I do wonder how long Devuan can continue building off a SystemD/Wayland/Pulseaudio/GNOME/etc-only ecology, before it has to fork irrevocably. That will be a sad day, but I guess it's inevitable sooner or later.

BOFH: We've made a big mesh, Boss. That's what you wanted, right?

Re: Gobshite

Well, there was that Father Ted episode where Father Jack actually sobered up briefly and proffered his opinion on the eponymous lead character.

Latest SiFive RISC-V cores aim to boost performance, accelerate AI workloads

Re: Don't confuse open-source and RISC-V

Sounds to me like someone is confusing cheap'n'cheerful silicon with performant silicon here.

Vodafone to fast-track Arm-based OpenRAN for mobile networks

Re: You put erroneous statements in my mouth and then claim I'm wrong.

Well, PLMN and Core are both four-letter words, I mean, c'm on! ;o)

But take say E1. That is an old CEPT standard and was not just confined to the RAN. So let's not go down the wrong rabbit-holes here.

The point is that OpenRAN pushes open standards into the parts other RANs don't reach. The clue is in the name.

Re: OpenRAN, or Open Radio Access Networks...

By 3GPP I assume you mean the 5G NR air interface defined by the 3GPP standards body.

The RAN - the radio access network - is not the air interface, it is all the back crap that connects the base station through to the PLMN - the public land mobile network.

New information physics theory is evidence 'we're living in a simulation,' says author

"According to thermodynamics, if we treat entropy as a measure of information in a system, then information tends always to increase."

"But according to quantum information theory, information is neither created nor destroyed in any quantum interaction, though it may be transformed."

"Or, er... right then. Ahem! In thermodynamics entropy represents a capacity to hold information. Thus, entropy can increase even though the information contained doesn't."

"But according to astrophysics, the area of a black hole's event horizon is directly proportional to both its entropy and the information it has swallowed."

"Oh, bollocks! Excuse me while I cook up a theory of information entropy and see if I can change the subject..."

My crystal balls now suggest that soon, we will be told that the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness (IIT) should really be a theory of information entropy. Hey! maybe the decreasing entropy with age is why we get slower and stupider in old age? I claim my Nobel Prize!

Linux interop is maturing fast… thanks to a games console

Re: Kvetching

Oy veh! Kvetching about kvetching, already!

I just love the vast melting-pot of dialects which constitute the English language.

Re: "Solution: new Linux features to fill in the missing gaps"

"Windows, under all the marketing BS, is a very good OS. It's just that the Microsoft saleslizards bury it in layers of their fœtid guano, more and more in each version."

If by that you mean that the engine gets better but the UI gets shittier with each new release since Win98, I entirely agree. About two months ago I came out of retirement, left behind my late-20th-century-paradigm MATE fork of GNOME2 and encountered the delights of a cloudy Windows "desktop" built around SharePoint and Office365. Boy has my productivity plummeted! Andy me equanimity - I now look like the icon. I spend half my time waiting for pop-ups to fuck off and reveal the thing I was about to click on, and the other half waiting for another reboot following another update. Hunting through the bloody ribbon to find out where they have hidden stuff that all belongs on the same menu barely gets a look in. Word is as appalling as ever - just try highlighting a phrase but not the paragraph break at the end of it! And as for tracking down that file someone emailed a link to, to its Sharepoint folder, or was that OneDrive or that other one whose name thankfully escapes me. Amazingly, the engine chugs stolidly through the whole lot, picking itself up, dusting itself down, and carrying on regardless a hundred times a day. It's nearly as solid as my Devuan box. Boy does it need to be!