Posts by bigtreeman

Bezos plan for solar powered datacenters is out of this world… literally

Dementia

Bezos showing early stages of dementia ?

Microsoft declares bring your Copilot to work day, usurping IT authority

Laugh

I've got a belly laugh building up,

when AI fails in a really big way I'm just going to let it out.

A 'told you so' moment is coming.

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

Able Baker Charlie

Calling

Roger Fox Dogs

Cheech & Chong

Meta's AI, built on ill-gotten content, can probably build a digital you

"... Be that as it may, the huge majority of the indigenous British population inhabits a cultural wasteland, and with no offing remedy. In that regard, leaders and plebeians are indistinguishable. Perhaps, the content of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube 'influencer' videos, and nail-biting Eurovision Song Contests, represent a pinnacle of achievement?..."

You missed out the cultural wastelands of reality tv, sport and gambling which consume so much of the proletariat's existence.

inane rubbish

Most of FaceAche feels like inane rubbish. I occasionally log in and have a browse, then logout, disgusted with myself for going there.

I do use Marketplace to sell second hand stuff and I've had success, although may in that space are looking for stupidly low prices.

Many friends only use messenger to communicate, so I tend to loose contact and hear about events, etc through secondary channels like my phone or email.

Generated by human or AI, it will still be rubbish.

Even Netflix struggles to identify and understand the cost of its AWS estate

Re: bend over netflix

Beholden to Amazon AWS at the same time competing with Amazon Prime.

I think I know how this ends.

Starlink-branded hardware reportedly found amid wreckage of downed Russian drone

Re: fairly obvious to Starlink if its kit is used on a drone

Starlink ID and serial number are linked to our account and email.

Choose Your Own Adventure with Microsoft 365

Re: Do you have access to an IT professional for advanced support and services?

Your moronic CEO only uses Powerpoint for pretty slides.

How a cheap barcode scanner helped fix CrowdStrike'd Windows PCs in a flash

Re: Brilliant concept!

Back in the 90s I used a barcode scanner to enter the device serial number into the firmware to program into secure modem micro-controllers, programmed in Forth.

Scan the serial number from the sticker on the box, program, test, assemble .... out the door. Really quick, secure and simple.

Microsoft 365 remains 'degraded' as Azure outage resolved

Office 360

Microsoft 365 (the artist formerly known as Office 365)

but known to some as Office 360, with 5 days off for bad behaviour.

Pi goes to spaaaaace... for a bit longer than planned

Hard Pie

So was the pie made with radiation hardened components ?

Or just made with a hard crust ?

Pity it gets destroyed on re-entry and can't be tested for ionizing radiation damage.

Twitter grew an incredible '1.6%' since Musk's $44B takeover. Amazing. Wow

Worth so much more than money

X is a public megaphone for use by himself and extreme right wing nut jobs.

We need a volunteer to literally crawl over broken glass to fix this network

Re: "I literally crawled over broken glass for this company."

I literally had to crawl over broken glass under an indigenous support organisation to pull network cables, wearing a suit, protected with paper overalls.

What do we make of Apple's plan B for a down quarter – that $110B buyback of shares?

insider trading

Used to be called insider trading.

Before Ronald Reagan’s SEC allowed them in 1982, buybacks were treated as illegal stock manipulations in violation of the 1933 and 1934 Securities and Exchange Acts.

Why making pretend people with AGI is a waste of energy

Labour is a drain on corporate profit

AI is a new opportunity to reduce labor costs and increase profits,

just as computerisation reduced "drudgery" (labor costs).

Where are all the unemployed going to go,

rest on a beach or sleep on a park bench.

How long til corporations don't need any people to operate?

I'm going surfing, no AI in the lineup....yet.

OpenBSD 7.5 locks down with improved disk encryption support and syscall limitations

no systemd on my daily Devuan

~$ ps -aux | wc -l

346

~$

Re: If you want a fancier desktop setup why run Open?

"OpenBSD trades pain and performance for a small footprint ..."

I just installed 7.5 last night and am thoroughly impressed with the performance improvement over 7.4.

X is positively snappy compared to my daily Linux

We never agreed to only buy HP ink, say printer owners

subscription printer

You have become numb to paying for subscription software,

so what's wrong with subscription printing ?

If you tire of paying for Office365 subscriptions,

you can uninstall and install LibreOffice.

We have known about HP ink for a very long time now,

you bought the HP printer knowing how much it would cost.

My last Fuji-Xerox printer could use really cheap generic toner,

RIP, it has now gone to printer heaven.

Stop whinging

Microsoft calls AI privacy complaint 'doomsday hyperbole'

Re: Nowhere do they say what of their private information Microsoft ever improperly collected

Research has to reference the original works.

Plagiarism just steals.

AI just steals and puts it all in a big mixer

Linux for older phones postmarketOS changes its init system

End of Life

Says it all.

Systemd to put the nail in the coffin for geriatric hardware which still has a few good years.

Looking downwards is a story about Tiny Core Linux which might be more appropriate, uses busybox init.

Musk lashes out at Biden administration over rural broadband

NBN equivalent

faster | cheaper | better | sooner

pick 2

initially cheaper that is, until it falls out of the sky

Just as Australia should have built a government owned, fiber network,

before making promises of a better internet for all.

Redundant, full coverage, future proof, disaster proof, corporate corruption proof.

Microsoft 365's add-on avalanche is putting the squeeze on customers

Profit and loss

My partner, who has drunk from the 365 Kool-aid,

just puts the extra charges into her profit and loss equation.

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

RTFM

Telstra owners and dealers, RTFM

Don't sell these EVs to stupid people without warning them about the shortcomings.

EVs are great where I live 10C-30C,

Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi

CP/M or PC

Soon after the PC came out I had a choice of a 64k ram Z80, STD bus, CP/M boxen or a 640k PC-XT clone out the back door of a Chinese factory, both the same $1500. Wouldn't even think about any of the little, basically useless toys out there.

The PC came with a mountain of pirated software and IBM firmware proms with a math co-processor.

So the choice was pretty simple, that ugly beige box and green screen looked pretty good and did everything was asked of it, work or play.

To be, or not to be, in the office. Has returning to work stalled?

World's End

We were camping at World's End S.A. (Oz) when she had to do a conference call. Of course there is no signal at the end of the world, so, into the car and drive till we have 2 bars of 4G reception, and Bob's your uncle. But if we had StarLink it would have been easier.

Word turns 40: From 'new kid on the block' to 'I can't believe it's not bloatware'

FreeOffice

No mention of Staroffice or Openoffice ?

One person mentioned Libreoffice.

How can something free threaten the profits of a commercial application ?

Pay nothing, get nothing ?

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

home workshop bench

My Dad's workshop bench was made from the very sturdy frame of an IBM 402, centre of the workshop for decades.

Three signs that Wayland is becoming the favored way to get a GUI on Linux

development stopped because it works

...deprecated...

I just compiled and installed Aqualung music player,

because it works....

I tried a number of active alternatives which were crap.

It has been forked and even has new dev work

I use bits of software that haven't been advancing for many years,

but they work...

and there's nothing else does the job I want, the way I like doing it.

don't fuck with it if it works

Six Stages of systemd....

.... linuxcon.au 2014 titled "The Six Stages of systemd." ....

how many stages and stumbles for Wayland ?

sound like the 5 stages of grief

develop, release, debug ...

fuck me it's Windowz for Linux

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

BSDnix

Used a *BSD lately ?

Even if not the kernel, a lot of the stuff that makes Linux Desktop is in *BSDs.

That would add another 0.0001% to the count

Microsoft and GitHub are still trying to derail Copilot code copyright legal fight

Ah fork it

So is Copilot in effect forking small segments of code ?

If so is it then legal ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development) fairly well describes what Microsoft is doing.

VMware, AMD, Samsung and RISC-V push for confidential computing standards

Pwn the world

Port that "secure" framework into desktop operating systems and the corporate world has pwned everyone and all their data.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Utopia

Some of the best office jargon can be seen on (Australian) ABC Iview - Utopia.

Yes it's back, it's galling, politically correct and so much fun.

Dell reneges on remote work promise, tells staff to wear pants at least 3 days a week

wear pants

Here in Brisbane commuting can take 2 + hours, same getting home.

Wear pants might mean a nappy if you get the shits on the way,

which is very likely.

CAN do attitude: How thieves steal cars using network bus

Re: Easily solvable....

Tech people will want a clever tech answer to a problem.

Adding another layer of complexity, another point of failure

and a challenge for future hackers.

How about a low tech, old school, key lock somewhere in the network.

Only has to short CANH and CANL, could be retrofitted to all can bus vehicles.

A modern version of a steering lock (youngsters can google that).

FBI boss says COVID-19 'most likely' escaped from lab

FUCKING BULLSHIT

Fucking bullshit

just stirring up the next world war

believe the FB fucking I

or the scientists

How to get Linux onto a non-approved laptop

Re: Pre-installed

My Asus laptop came Win pre-installed.

I tried to boot Windows before installing Linux, just to see what a new (Win10) looked like.

100 questions later, signed up to some Microsoft account, on and on it went.

I gave up, turned off boot security and installed Devuan in minutes.

It took months before that Microsoft account was removed.

Microsoft upgrades Defender to lock down Linux gear for its own good

Not our friend

You have been warned - only use Windows desktop.

I'm tired, this has always been Microsoft 101.

Microsoft hasn't cosied up to Linux to be our friend.

Embrace, extend, extinguish

Atlassian CEO's bonkers scheme to pipe electricity from Australia to Singapore collapses

rich dreamers

If they had used the Tesla Wireless Power Transmission system,

I would have believed they were for real,

and not just rich, wanking dreamers.

Shame on Infrastructure Australia for giving the business case a big tick.

Pity they didn't run it by knowledgable engineers who would have given it a big fail.

BBC is still struggling with the digital switch, says watchdog

ABC vs BBC

The ABC down here in Oz started their digital transformation back in 2006 with video podcasting and has grown with technology since then.

Good on you Aunty.

Ventana targets hyperscalers with customizable RISC-V server chip

pivot to risc-v

I am pivoting to risc-v from arm.

Currently waiting for a StarFive VisionFive 2 board

and looking forward to an open future.

'What's the point of me being in my office, just because they want to see me in the office?'

Re: Contract clauses

Gold Coast to Brisbane commutes one to two hours each way, adds 25-50% extra, wasted time out of your lif.

then the rising cost of fuel and parking and lets not mention child minding.

Is it time to build that shit into your contract.

Remember folks an employment contract is not a one way, boss takes all agreement.

Strike out some of their clauses,

put in some of your own clauses.

It's called reaching an agreement,

and the more people do it,

the sooner employers will have to suck it up.

Microsoft's Lennart Poettering proposes tightening up Linux boot process

Devuan is working for me.

no Poettering

Lennart works for Microsoft

So why does his odour still linger in Linux.

Butoutsky

He now has to do what his employer tells him to do

and if that is detrimental to Linux ?

How GitHub Copilot could steer Microsoft into a copyright storm

Re: Am I the only one

So you are going to repeat errors fixed by past programmers.

Most businesses repeat past mistakes by not learning from their history.

We stand on the shoulders of giants.

IBM published it's bios code and all the circuit diagrams

so people could copy without copying.

This created the clone PC industry, hoo fucking raa.

I got a Chinese clone PC with it's own bios and spare eproms with IBM bios.

What, hoped Micro$oft had gone soft ?

..."When Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018, a lot of open source developers – me included – hoped for the best. Apparently that hope was misplaced."...

I've never had that problem, always expect the very worst from Micro$oft

OpenBSD 7.2: The other other FOSS xNix released, runs on Apple M2 Macs

7.2 arm64 framebuffer

Graphics via framebuffer make the arm64 port basically useless

unless you aren't running a headless boxen.

Wireless keyboard and mouse, not a problem, has worked for a long time.

Senior engineer reported to management for failing to fix a stapler

fix my glasses

I had a general manager who required, from time to time, me to come and maintain his glasses with my jewellers screwdriver, Duh.

Water pipes hold flood of untapped electricity potential

fucking horseshit

Water and waste water cost an enormous amount of electricity.

Pumping, filtering, treating.

The Reg has some dumb ass articles.

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

solder wick

A recent job interview, I had to show my proficiency removing a surface mount resistor with solder wick and a crap soldering iron.

That was pretty much how the whole place operated.

They were in a basement (dungeon) and got badly flooded in a big storm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHgTpc57lwo

Thats whats the deal we're dealin in