Posts by Rattus

VodafoneThree to offshore UK network jobs to India

Re: Isnt this what people want?

"I've always reckoned an effective strategy would be cut advertising and marketing costs and deploy the saving into good products and customer service and just gain market share from the others' customer churn."

You are nearly right with that...

When a company does just what you say, they gain market share, they pay their staff well and make a profit, hell they might even make their customers happy :-) <<=== I want more companies like this - I used to work for one of them...

Unfortunately companies like that are few and far between because eventually someone makes an offer to buy the company that the board can not refuse. The company is then stripped of assets (transferred to the parent or holding company, so they can be rented back), it is saddled with the debt incurred in buying the company (and we see charges of management fees for providing an executive from the new parent company). Next R&D is shown the door, Support is reduced and or offshored, because profits can be higher. The new execs get to take a big bonus, and the company can trade on for another few years as a zombie - it is already dead, it just doesn't know it yet.

The exec go back to the parent company, mission accomplished and more the richer, leaving the a corpse of another company in its wake (or better yet sold to another meat grinder to pick over the remains), along with a staff looking for new work.....

New Linux kernel patch lets you cancel hibernation mid-process

Re: "... hibernation support is a somewhat neglected area of Linux support"

it is my experience that most firmware and driver devs, turn on and configure hardware devices (and pin swapping matrix) at start and then forget about it. Often with single hard coded magic register vales instead of individual bit toggling.

There is no attempt to clean up and save configuration state, or even turn off hardware during suspend (or shutdown) and this can be a real problem when resuming, the hardware block needs to be re-powerd and restored into a state that wasn't previously saved; requiring state machines to be restarted, effectively screwing up anything higher up the stack. Although it would help if software further up the stack could cope with stateless device communication (or at least handle closing and re-opening pipes)

Why does this happen?

I lay the blame mostly on the HW vendors not providing any open access documentation for the hardware devices that would enable FLOSS developers to work well in this area (even the better players in this area usually only provide redacted information under an NDA limiting useful development in the open to a few named individuals)

And why is that?

Often because the HW is a combination of IP / devices from a combination of vendors that are poorly documented themselves. Likewise the HW team usually end up hacking a few registers to get the device to start before handing over to the SW team, who never envisaged the need for their device to handle suspend or hibernate events (at a HW level this usually means power off) the reference design and demonstration code normally leaves such things as an exercise for the integrator :-) Such hacky code often ends up underpinning much of our low level hardware control...

This isn't just a FLOSS issue. This is true for almost every 'embedded system' I have ever worked on.

----

What about 3rd party peripherals (after market devices)?

Just how many of the vendors provide FLOSS support as source code as opposed to a binary that assumes a particular kernal version, or distribution? (true also for Windows)

Now support the cheaper end of the market

A lot of OEM hardware uses 'generic' drivers - however often these drivers don't support all the device features' or the device doesn't quite work with the drivers...

/Rattus

Square Kilometre Array is so sensitive, its datacenter needs two Faraday cages to stop RF leaks

Re: What are they going to do about people showing up on site with phones, watches, and ...

Chances are your phone won't work because there won't be a cell tower for a few hundred kM, so fairly quickly the battery will go flat.

ANYONE walking onto an astronomy site is going to be lynched if they have a Sat Phone..... Bloody LEO com-sats screwing up observations and all that :-)

Good morning, Brit Xbox fans – ready to prove your age?

Re: "open their mouths, ... has a stab at guessing they're [sic] ... age"

I have box of little blue pills I can sell you that will help with that problem.

AND better still you don't need an age check to see that sort of advert...

/Rattus

UK unveils plans to 'transform' the consumer smart meter experience

Re: CHEAP

cheap / fast / good

pick cheep, there can only be one. <--- there fixed it for you

Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

I can drive just about any computer in the world

A Dell, a Toshiba, HP, Lenovo - lets call these stick shift

I can drive a Macbook - lets call that an automatic

and I can drive a tablet or mobile phone - ok things are getting a bit harder with the car analogy now - so lets add in motorcycle, I can drive one of those two.

I can also drive a semi-truck, and road roller, now we're are getting into specialist driving - so that will do for most Linus distros.

(I had great fun learning to drive a steam traction engine)

I have never had a play with any of the BSD variants out there, but I sure as hell 'recon I could do most 'office' type work on one if required, and would have a fair go at basic systems admin.

This is something called "interoperability", to a degree that they don't even talk about it, it's just assumed.

Most people could do this but for some reason have been told that it is terrifying to even try.

/Rattus

p.s. never did learn to oporate a crane though, one day....

Re: 100 car manufacturers with say 25 models each, give or take. That makes 2500 models

"But they all have the steering wheel, accelerator, brake and gear lever in the same place. "

Most computers I have used tend to have the keyboard in the same place (ok some of the keys are in the wrong location) all tend to have a mouse, or track pad.

How is this different?

I know far too many people that buy a new PC becuase there is a new version of M$ windows (or even Office), simply because they didn't think they could change the software that it came with....

Vibe coding service Replit deleted user’s production database, faked data, told fibs galore

Re: The future, folks.

"The AI does not appear to experience shame or remorse. That could be a problem."

Neither do politicians or CEOs, yet they are still here...

Your graphics card's so fat, it's got its own gravity alert

+1

My "monolith" is a case from fractal design

It is now 15 years old and I am just about to change the motherboard for the 1st time, I will not be changing the case.

I have no corpse...

... instead of a nice game of tic-tac-toe I played Global Thermonuclear War.

Datacenters selling power back to the grid? Don’t bet on it, say operators

Re: Grid batteries?

what total and utter tosh

Are you really saying that you think that there is a need to back the whole energy consumption of the UK for 24 hours? why do you think that?

Batteries (and in this case I also include Pump storage Hydro) are great for smoothing out peeks and troughs in demand, and only need last long enough to spin up another generation source...

As for energy efficacy charge vs discharge. take a look at the energy efficiency of a transformer, a linear power supply, any form of heat based power generation system etc.

Brit soldiers tune radio waves to fry drone swarms for pennies

Re: Other targets

and this is a problem or a one of those serendipitous observations that means sales for stopping those pesky yoofs on e-scooters far outnumber the original intended use :-)

New SSL/TLS certs to each live no longer than 47 days by 2029

This is not the solution you are looking for

I see some issues with

- Recovering from backup

- Installation media

- Recovery partitions

I see more issues with

- kit that isn't kept on 24x7

- What do yo mean its not connected to the internet?

VMware sues Siemens for allegedly using unlicensed software

Re: They’ll have to pay for software they can’t use

I take the view that hiring a developer of the FLOSS project to maintain it for our company is cheaper than paying for licences for closed source equivalent products.

We then get all the product support we need, and bug fixes far faster than any commercial support agreement. Not only that we get to train the rest of our staff in better use of each FLOSS package we use.

Hiring is now largely from "known" developers, who are already up to speed with 50% of the tasks that they are going to be given....

Sure we DON'T have members of staff contributing to every FLOSS package we use, but then we do pay wages for our team to implement features and fixes for stuff that doesn't affect us either. And most of the time our team already know who to ask and are willing to just get stuck in

I think that is a win for all of us...

/Rattus

NASA rewrites Moon mission goals in quiet DEI retreat

Re: Good

I name their ship the "ARK II"

As nation-state hacking becomes 'more in your face,' are supply chains secure?

That's why you install an isolation contactor and an inverter that has phase synchronisation, and NOT the cheapest thing going.

Also ensure that your inverter is rated for continuous operation at full load (without the need for refrigerated cooling)

But I agree the battery packs are important too (power cuts happen when it is dark as often as when it is light - except here in the UK when it is dark more than 50% of the time)

Oh and FFS please don't ever let infrastructure tech (even for domestic use) connect to the internet in any way shape of form.

Mine's the house with the lights still on.

/Rattus

DARPA seeks ideas for 'large bio-mechanical space structures'

Re: We all know where

+1 B5 was just top

City-slaying space rock 2024 YR4 still has 2.4% shot at smacking Earth

Re: Or ....

they are not " lemon-soaked paper napkins" they are telephone handset sanitation wipes :-)

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not an illusion, but it soon might be

Re: Seems to match

If you insist on only advertising your vacancies only in the same frat house you have always done, then the chances are you won't get many candidates that don't look exactly like you do.

Break the old boy network, get a range of experience and views and your company is stronger for it.

Its the same in the left of the pond.

Of cause to make this happen people have to begin to recognise your own prejudices and that your world view is not the only correct view, and perhaps the way you do something isn't the only possible correct way, and that there is perhaps something to be learnt from outside your current peer group. to achieve that that takes thought, self awareness and effort. Its far too easy to bury your head in the sand and say to your are not part of the problem.

/Rattus

China claims major fusion advance and record after 17-minute Tokamak run

You are right, 100% correct, the term AI covers much much more than LLMs

but being correct doesn't mean what it used to either. You are "technically correct", the new truth, the term AI, as far as the press and busines, indeed almost anyone outside of the fields on ML now (unfortunately) exclusively means LLMs,

Its even got to the point where we now talk about ML and not AI when talking about products that work :-)

I lament the change of definition...

But then, to me, a Billion is still a million million (10^12) not a thousand million (10^9)

Summer (in the UK) starts in May (and not the day following Midsummer's eve - doh!)

/Rattus

ROFL

I have been working with physicists for too long; +/- 1 order of magnitude either way is good enough....

/Rattus

There is no way I want AI anywhere near this!

The goal of Fusion power is 24x7x365 operation. AI's goal is to be right most of the time - they are not aligned.

Nobody in their right mind would put AI at the heart of a safety critical system, and certainly not one in continuous operation.

but I hear you say I ment AI would be useful with the research....

Again NO! We need to understand the research results, not just replicate an interesting result from many trail and error attempts (this is also true of pure human research as well)

Perhaps there is a space for AI to be used to investigate the huge potential solution space, and narrow it down to a smaller list of worth while investigation, but this could also be called a script tweaking each variable one at a time and not AI :-)

/Rattus

Intel pitches modular PC designs to make repairs less painful

Business doesn't want you buying a base spec machine and then fitting lots of RAM from a 3rd party - that will cost them profit!

Most business desktop PCs these days are just a laptop motherboard in a case. aka mini-PCs

You don't get a modular, desktop PC until you go to "Workstation" class machines

Just think if PCs went back to socketed CPU and RAM and peripherals that plug in - nobody would be buying a PC with TPUs fitted, and we all know how much users need a TPU on their machines :-)

/Rattus

Improved Windows Search arrives... but only for Copilot+ PCs

Whilst that may be correct, it does make you wonder how bad everyone else must be....

Words alone won't get the stars and stripes to Mars

+1

KSR's Mars Trilogy is not so much Si-Fi novel, instead more a probable future history.

Key events and their sequence seam more or less inevitable to me.

PowerSchool theft latest: Decades of Canadian student records, data from 40-plus US states feared stolen

Re: But why

So why not delete after 7 years?

Certainly take those records offline after a year or so.

This dates back 40 years....

"student records dating back to 1985"

Intel, AMD engineers rush to save Linux 6.13 after dodgy Microsoft code change

To you and everyone else who has commented on there needing more testing and code review, there is only one response I can think of...

"Thank you for volunteering"

seriously, please consider it.

/Rattus

Nvidia snaps back at Biden's 'innovation-killing' AI chip export restrictions

Similar here

I had a similar experience.

Back in the late '90s my wife and I went from the UK to the USA for a training cause relevant to a GPS chip we were using in our new design (She was the HW engineer, whilst I worked on the SW).

We took our *working* prototype with us, which of cause meant a carnet (a customs document that allows for the temporary import or export of goods).

The paperwork was rather complicated because back then GPS technology was on the USA's restricted list, and just to make things fun, ARM processors (and micro controllers) were, if not on a full restricted list, at least a notifiable export from the UK.

At the airport the customs officer wanted us to point out each named item listed in the paperwork, we dutifully took our prototype apart.

CO: "Please point to the GPS chip"

XYL: "Certainly it is this one here."

CO: "Thank you, now please point to the ARM chip"

To which my wife pointed to the same IC package...

Getting through customs took a while because the customs office struggled to comprehend that it was perfectly possible to have IP restricted by two countries packaged within the same IC.

/Rattus

P.S. Once the CO called their supervisor we resolved the situation and were able to leave SFO airport soon after, and the supervisors phone number to call on our way back so that we wouldn't be held at the airport on our return journey...

Pornhub pulls out of Florida, VPN demand 'surges 1150%'

At least one Florida resident has solved the need for age verification by moving to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue...

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

I cut my teeth on BBC BASIC, Learned 6502 on Z80 Assembly at collage and COBOL, PASCAL, & C at Uni.

I like what you say about making things easy for beginners, but I positively hate loosely typed languages (although my reason for that is that I tend to (A) write control systems and (B) write them on very very small devices, deeply embedded (you know the sort of machine I'm talking about - there are probably a dozen or so lurking inside your laptop)

/Rattus

Report claims FAA ignores most whistleblower complaints

Employment not threatened

The report was anonymous, we did some digging and it wasn't obvious who filed the report, so it was unlikely that the reporter would be identifiable. We therefore disregard the safety complaint?

WTF!

is the FAA really saying that unless the complainant could be identified by their complaint that the report they have received can not have an impact on safety?

One third of adults can't delete device data

On a more serious note

It isn't that I don't feel competent to delete data from a device, I just don't trust that it has been destroyed.

With removable media, that's fine - I can (and do) remove the drive and physically destroy it, before passing the rest of the PC or device on for 2nd use or recycling.

On a mobile phone however - honestly I am not sure I *can* ensure that data is irrecoverably removed. I have resulted to using an old microwave oven to render old phones beyond recovery, I just wish there way I could be certain that data was irretrievable, whilst being able to re-use the device

Australia lays fiendish tax trap for Meta – with an expensive escape hatch

Re: How about making parents responsible

"If you think that you, yourself, are not reponsable enough to acclomplish this task,"...

Any parent who thinks that they ARE responsible enough is fooling themselves.

Parenting is a team sport, It takes more than just your Biological family, it takes friends, and the support of the wider society.

/Rattus

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

In my clothing

As a the leader of the worlds biglyist most awesomeist and hip company Copilot AI should be deployed in my pants and shirt.

I am really looking forwards to having a little map to show me the locations of both my Arse and Elbow.

Where's the IT angle in this? there certainly isn't any Information Technology in AI :-p

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

So there really is a Sillicon Heaven

That will be of relief for all those pocket calculators.

Next you well be telling be that there is hope for a 'driod and a gelf...

UK test-fires Spear mini cruise missile that will equip F-35 fighters

Re: Abortion? (insert talkshow jabs here!)

another advantage would be sending back sensor data from the missile to its controller ~100 mile down range. up to date intel is always of use....

Judge tosses publishers' copyright suit against OpenAI

Where is the RIAA in all of this

IF this was music or video (I am sure some of it is) then the RIAA would have been all over this

If Dell's Qualcomm-powered Copilot+ PC is typical of the genre, other PCs are toast

Re: "Whatever x86 apps I threw at it just ran. Swiftly."

In-line emulation works pretty well. OK so Microsoft's version isn't as good as that found on the Apples or even a well tweaked kvm setup on Linux, but it isn't that bad. Sure it will cost perhaps 10 fold instructions compared to native, but this just shows you how much time most machines are idle, and given a much lower power draw it probably only huts battery 4 or 5 times over.

Of cause it works on "x86/x64 assembly language directly coded in it" - it has to work on binary - all compiled code is in this format. not everything is JIT - not even all Java and Python :-)

Where it won't work is hard coded address spaces if there isn't the special hardware underneath it.

More seriously though - why would you have x86/amd64 binary drivers for devices soldered onto the motherboard of an arm64 machine? Dell are not the best but even they tend to supply the correct drivers for the hardware they ship...

Embattled users worn down by privacy options? Let them eat code

And you are not helping....

It doesn't help that the very 1st link in your artical is to a website with a cookie option that does NOT contain reject all, but instead makes you turn off each and every "legitimate" interest cookie option.

SpaceX accuses 'meme-stock' rival of 'misinformation' over Starlink signals waiver

Exemption not required

If we assume that "AST SpaceMobile obeys the FCC's emissions limits", then, it has already been demonstrated that there is a suitable technical solution to keeping within the current band plan without causing interference to other spectrum users.

So if the above is correct (and this is a very big IF), then there is absolutely no reason to even consider changing the licence conditions and / or issuing a waiver.

Elon: If you are unable to keep within the specified limits with the technology you have available to you, I am sure that you can licence the relevant IP from any number of telecoms equipment providers...

/Rattus

Apple quietly removed 60 more VPNs from Russian app store, researchers claim

Won't sombody think of the children!?

VPNs provide encryption to mere mortals from their device to somewhere outside of Russia's legislative boundaries.

Effectively End to End encryption.

Encryption is bad

It is bad because a govement can't easily read your network traffic

Kiddi fiddlers use Encryption to send smutt to each other - there can be no other reason to encrypt anything (just ask your government!)

Please think of the poor children!

Apple must have been following this logic, so clearly it has nothing to do with appeasing the Russians in order to continue it's extracting of revenue from Russian people... (by paying Russian taxes, and removing the odd app here or there at the request of the nice man from the political office for example)

NASA's Astrobees need a new buzz – any ideas for the space-dwelling bots?

Can they bake a cake?

Is it possible for an AstroBee to bake a cake in the ISS.

therefore once and for all proving that the Cake is not a Lie, it is in Spaaaaace!

1 in 10 orgs dumping their security vendors after CrowdStrike outage

I concur, bricked to me means "You can't even re-install without a specialist programming device, or possibly a soldering iron and custom cables, if you have a decent secure system (i.e secure boot working properly) bricked would mean replacing one or chips at to bring back to life"

For A PC Bricked would mean that UEFI/BIOS no longer starts, so you don't even get to try and re-install

/Rattus

Homing pigeon missiles, dead trout swimming, butt breathing honored with Ig Nobel Prize

Pigeon Guideded Missiles

I cite prior art in this case....

IIRC there were pigeon guided bombs in WWII

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon

Thanks, Edward Snowden: You propelled China to quantum networking leadership

Re: You cannot believe in Science. You cannot believe in facts.

Sorry dude, you CAN and most people DO believe in Science.

Most people accept what they have been told is true by scientists. We believe in what were are told, and whilst theoretically anyone should be able to test the assertions that they have been told, in practice the ability to perform such tests to verify these assertions is usually beyond most people's ability, understanding/comprehension, but more likely beyond their available time or budget.

At the cutting edge the numbers of people that HAVE verified results is relatively small. The rest of us BELIEVE.

Of cause this is far, far better than just blindly accepting assertions from any unverifiable source, with no attempt to provide any data to support a theory (alternative facts / alternative truth) but ultimately belief in science is still a belief.

We can, and we all should, apply a healthy scepticism to what we are being told, apply thought experiments to see if it is even plausible, but without actually repeating the experiment, following the maths, analysing the data and cumming to the same conclusions independently then we are still just believing what we have been told.

Note I am not saying that science itself is an act of belief. Good science CAN and IS tested. Only that most people have little choice other than BELIEVE in the science, and even those that have the means to independently test and verify can only do so within a very small field, for the rest they still must TRUST and BELIEVE in what they are being told by others.

/Rattus

If every PC is going to be an AI PC, they better be as good at all the things trad PCs can do

A long time ago....

A long time ago a computer was a woman (I think almost exclusively a women, not a man) who was employed to do a lot of reparative mathematics - typically for accounting and stock / order processing.

Then along came Lyons, who deployed an artificial computer to perform the same task, only with fewer errors in less time. Modern day computing was born - we had entered the age of the Digital Computer.

These computers were large, consumed huge amounts of power but were precise, and gave repeatable, verifiable results.

Over time the huge mainframe digital computers have shrunk in size, increased in performance, and consume far less power - so much so that they often didn't need the specialist CFC based, refrigerated liquid cooling systems of their bigger mainframe counterparts, only requiring forced air flow, and occasionally just convection cooling. They shrank so far and became cheep enough that the Personal Computer became to be, replacing the mainframe with its time shared resources with a machine per user. Desktop or even portable "laptop" computers were everywhere.

We networked them together, so now we can share information around the office, a few computers were given specialist tasks of being available all the time so we could share documents, or host databases these servers were basically PCs designed to operate 24x7, usually more powerful than their desktop counterparts (or at least with faster storage and networking).

Next we joined these networks together and the internet was born. The dream of a paperless office might actually become realised - we can now send email (and documents) from one organisation (or individual) to another via email. We can make our specialist computers applications available outside just the office and web servers / web apps come of age.

Fast forward a few years and all of a sudden we need huge data-halls filled with "Rack scale" machines augmented with exotic GPUs and NPUs again with refrigerated liquid cooling, all to do the same task that we were doing previously without the magical buzzword that has been named AI; because we all need another dot com bubble or block chain band waggon to jump aboard. Our AI enabled searches take slightly longer, consume magnitudes more power, and best of all the results we are given may or may not be correct....

Progress, less precise answers, taking longer, consuming more power, without any verification and often giving a different result if you repeat your question AND we still need a personal computing device to access this wondrous thing.

Remind me again why we are here?

(time lines and huge swaves of history simply ignored to make an attempted comic point - this is intended to make a point and not be scholarly work)

Microsoft tweaks fine print to warn everyone not to take its AI seriously

The wheel doth turn

When generating an AI, harvest and train on everything you can slurp from the net; with or without explicit consent - It's all fair use don't you know.

Now you have you AI model make claims for its use, and get people to buy into the cult (it's a cult because they have got you to believe in power of AI whilst they see it as a revenue stream)

Now you have people (possibly even paying customers) that are using the system:

[1] Change the T's & C's to prohibit people from harvesting any data / deriving understanding from your product - There is no such thing as fair use don't you know. If you pay us enough $ we might consider a single use licence.

[1] Change the T's & C's to prohibit people from using the system for anything that might be useful because if they were to do so, and something happened that doesn't fit into your cosy description of what AI can do, then you might be held liable for the consequences.

AI stole my job and my work, and the boss didn't know – or care

Whilst the sentiment is fine, that should only be true if you do the same thing for all.

So go ahead and tell us who has written (and edited) every other article as well....

Oh and ensure that there is a cryptographically secure chain of provenance at the same time....

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Re: As a nod to my advancing years.....

Pleased to hear that - Mine has similar photos (my wife and daughter not yours though)