Posts by Ken G

Spies, prime ministers, and balls: The BBC Domesday project @ 40

Re: How much data?

What are you backing your web up to?

Re: Impermanance

"As was entirely predictable, our discs aged and became difficult to read. The expensive LV-ROM player was quickly superseded by cheaper and more widely available CD-ROM and DVD systems."

And how are those CD-ROMs and DVDs holding up 30+ years later?

Dutch government turns to NixOS for a sovereign desktop

Re: Reinventing the wheel ?

And at the beginning is Active Directory/Entra. If you need to use MS for user authentication and authorisation then you may as well use the products it works with, OS and Comms and Office.

BOFH: The Helldesk opens its third eye and ascends to a higher plane of troubleshooting

Re: How doers it feel

But how bad does it make you fe-el?

Project leader thought his team understood the plan, ended up fixing their 'interpretation' of it

I had the opposite happen at the end of the last century in deepest Somerset. We were working on the top floor of an older office building when the summer heat became unbearable. The company said we'd have to put up with it and put in a water bottle on a stand. Then the huge (26") CRT monitors of the graphics design department started blowing from the heat. We had aircon by the end of the next week.

Re: "Our plan was better"

Perhaps their plan was better but their execution was worse?

Artificial intelligence must have a new name, says politician who likes renaming bodies of water

Re: American Intelligence

Overconfident and prone to hallucinations.

American Intelligence

That way no-one has to rename their AI programmes.

KDE turns 30 and someone's brought an AI-native desktop proposal

Where did that shortcut go?

What I read from that is that the desktop will put links to things that people like me usually use and remove those to things I rarely use, even if the only reason I put a shortcut on the desktop was to find the particular programme I only need every few months that doesn't have a name obviously linked to its purpose.

Security vets rally around $4 paper password books for sale in Australia

Re: Shit Job, but someone has to do it

There's a plot line they didn't explore on Mission Impossible.

Let's see Tom Cruise lowered on a rope into that.

Trump sends the US Navy back to the steam age

Re: Drums

I don't think he's going to run.

He's just going to sit there and cancel any election results.

The 22nd amendment only says no-one can be elected to a third term, not that they can't serve one.

I think it depends what you want to use them for.

Carriers are about projecting force at long distances. Where are Britain realistically going to do that? You're not going to get into a pissing match with India or China, you're not going to fight the US no matter what you do, nor attack Russia on your own. For the latter, with allies, you can use land bases. The same for Middle Eastern attacks. That leaves Africa or South America. You don't need or want to send in F-35's against Yemen, Sudan or Argentina.

If you really wanted, I think you could get a cheaper EMALS that handles up to 10t and build aircraft to use that. HAL are still building BAe Hawks and the Goshawk exists. Presumably that wouldn't be too hard to recreate for pilot training and a GosHawk 200 version for attacking people who don't have a near-peer air force. Leonardo got part way to building an M-346N if you wanted something more modern.

Mind you, if you were doing that you could put them on cheaper carriers, converted French Mistral class assault ships or copies of the Chinese Type 076 helicopter dock and you would probably want to supplement the manned aircraft with fast jet drones like the Turkish Bayraktar Kızılelma or Anka 3.

Gym rat asks AI agent to book him a class, it hacks a waitlist API to bump him up the list

Re: Dangerous thing you've got there....

It sounds like no laws were broken. If any were, it should be on the Gym for publishing an API that permits illegal changes.

New Boeing finally gets going, 15 years after debut

Re: cost cutting

greater than 9.8 m/s²?

Re: Stretching a dead horse

Incremental improvement. Like mainframes.

Re: 777

I really don't think the nationality matters as much as the skill (and pay grade). If Boeing pay more than other companies in India and invest in training and retaining their staff, they'll be good. If Boeing pay less than the best in India and don't show any career path for local staff then they'll get sub-par work that _just_ meets the specifications, with no questions asked about the validity of those specifications.

Zorin OS 18.1 released - and the Lite edition reappears

Two of my favourite Irish distros

I usually am tempted by Zorin but so far I've always used Mint. I might change for my next install though as I want a dual boot with WIn10 (some drivers for a dongle to attach to my car).

BOFH: This printer engineer knows every trick in the book

Re: Sounds familiar

I'll have a look, I've tried Magic Earth and OSMAnd+ but I'm still looking for a good nav tool.

The last one I liked was a 3rd party Blackberry 10 app I used back in 2014 and somewhere in the next few years it was bought out, "upgraded" and enshittified with ads and paid map upgrades.

edit: It turns out I have Organic Maps already installed but haven't tried it yet.

edit2: and my compass direction is reversed, which explains something - that will distract me from work for a while

US Marines' latest anti-drone toy is an AI turret that uses regular machine guns

WW1 technology, the Ukrainians have had success with Maxim guns

The danger to everyone around tha you describe is the same whether it's artificial intelligence or natural stupidity pulling the trigger.

Scientist models way to make sure no one's violating the ban on nuclear weapons in space

There are really only 2 nations who could build and launch that detector

And they're the two most likely to break the treaty in the first place.

BOFH: Cross-department AI pitches are easier to swallow with a pint in hand

I thought Hitachi made those.

Boffins peg narcissistic leadership as the real driver behind 'return to office' demands

small world?

I just spotted your username and wondered, might you have worked in Scotland and do the initials FRO mean anything to you (in the context of narcissistic managers?)

@author > error?

Multiple billion-dollar companies are promising today's workers a shot at making millions from an IPO.

should read "are not offering..."

Four years into Ukraine invasion, Russia turns influence-ops back to US and Europe

Re: Is AI really helping?

I'd guess it helps with translation and idioms, as well as generating variety around the same message. It may also help them find social media threads to target and accounts that seem sympathetic to their arguments. Nothing transformational, just efficiency gains.

England's exam watchdog frets over smart specs turning GCSEs into Google searches

Re: Nothing new

A student who could create that based on their specific class content has a great future ahead of them, regardless of exam grade.

Brit maritime agency heralds fresh global rules for crewless cargo ships

Re: Internet piracy 2.0

I assume the person "spinning the wheel" is doing so from 1000's of km away in a country with no extradition to the US.

Palantir wins £9M contract to run UK firearms licensing: CIA-backed biz to hold gun, bomb, and poison records

I believe it's completely above board. Palantir are willing to take a loss on delivery of the project to get entry to the UK secure databases.

So long as they meet the delivery criteria, which I'm sure they're capable of doing, all other things being equal the lowest bid wins.

Re: Oh For Fuck Sake

What ever made you think that?

If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

or perhaps they bid consistently lower than all other providers?

All the passwords were stored in Active Directory description fields

Re: Read the fricken manual

You don't know what Microsoft assumes, or cares about.

Satellite phone dreams orbit reality as direct-to-cell usage set to underwhelm

upvote for phrasing

"I've worked in this space"

'Resistance is futile,' says Qualcomm CEO. AI agents will be become invisible, inescapable, follow you across devices

without the need for human supervision

I'll let you be the one to try that definition of agent out first, Mr Mann.

Blue Origin's New Glenn makes a crater-sized dent in Artemis plans

Re: Have you seen the flight computers?

Yes the change to engines that can stop, start and vary thrust is immensely complex.

I aim at the stars!

(but sometimes I hit Florida)

Deus ex machina: Half of US Christians trust AI's spiritual advice

Re: Christians

You've met our SysAdmins then?

Re: Christians

I can do those myself, how is he at debugging code?

AIs don't like religion – particularly Jehovah's Witnesses, study claims

This isn't an AI hallucination

It's just having a vision.

"What would Satan do?"

Any AI will be happy to give guidance on that basis unless it conflicts with commercial confidentiality of the provider and replying would give away Zuckerberg, Musk or Bezos plans.

Dems slam Trump for making cybersecurity hold out the tin cup while splurging on ballroom and Jan. 6 'slush fund'

Two entirely separate things

It implies they'd have been quite happy funding the ballroom and bribery if only he'd stepped up patching and pen-testing at the same time.

Yes, you can serve a website from a $1 microcontroller

Re: "root through dumpsters to find an old one [vape]. "

and open a new business model of grabbing them from people's lips and running

Why is pricing in Yankee Thalers?

It explicitly describes the person doing this as European and so I'd expect his costs to have been incurred in Euro.

Plex appeal fades as Lifetime Pass jumps to $750

I'm here!

But i have been using Plex.

Rodent-obsessed developer creates Ratty to bring 3D graphics to the command line

Re: Different sort of Temple

There's only one way to find out for sure.

The latest innovation in UK public transport: Schrödinger's trains

Re: Adams not Schrödinger

but if she doesn't want you following her home, we land back in Schrödinger territory.

Re: Schrödinger trains

More about whether consent did or didn't occur.

Re: Schrödinger's trains II

I hope they paid you compensation for the disruption.

Re: Schrödinger's trains II

Interesting. I assume the 3 minute separation is to avoid the wake of the earlier "heavy" train disrupting the takeoff of the 2nd one?

Quit VMware and you’ll emerge with more complex and less capable infrastructure

there is no technical reason for VMware users to adopt a rival hypervisor

Completely true, and no rival offers the same functionality yet.

There's a huge, commercial "but" sitting in the middle of that statement. If VMWare had kept it's old licensing terms or incrementally crept up it's prices, no-one would jump. Broadcom scared the horses and the stampede has started. This is about insulation from future shocks delivered by an unreliable partner.

Home Office seeks three CTOs to keep borders, passports, and core IT ticking

Re: Too many chiefs...

except that really isn't the pay grade they need to offer to stand a chance of getting anyone with any relevant skills.

Cheap Technical Officers?

I guess they're not looking for anyone with experience of either technology or public sector then?