Posts by 502 bad gateway

RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language

RIP

RIP Kathleen

If you get the urge to read that 1958 APEXC programming guide, note it's hidden behind an institutional paywall... even after all these years

Elon Musk shows what being Chief Twit is all about across weird weekend

Face palm, again

Perhaps the man baby is waking up now, finally realising that operating a social media platform requires a different skill set, and it's not just a jolly hobby. Perhaps he realises that the lawyers are circling, waiting for something actionable. Perhaps he realises what a douche bag he looks when sharing crazy wingnut conspiracy theories -- that everyone else calls lies.

Words of wisdom that Elon would do well to take notice of: 'Don't get high on your own supply' -- Tony Montana, Scarface. 1983

Open source's totally non-secret weapon big tech dares not use: Staying relevant

Voluntary unemployment

Meta wants everyone to work in the metaverse, and is denying the awkward fact that strapping shoeboxes to our heads is completely irrelevant to our day jobs. But guess how long a career at Meta will be for anyone who says so.

Senior management in big corporations certainly have some heavy-duty reality insulation, combine that with the perpetual circle jerk of mutual arse kissing, a cult like belief in the corporate propaganda and you have an infallible recipe for doing stupid way beyond the point when a face-saving course reversal is tenable.

US plans to open up government-funded science research papers to all

Hooray

At last, I for one am fed up with paying $40 for 8 pages of irrelevant research based on a misleading snippet.

AMD confirms Ryzen chips' stuttering performance on Windows 10, 11

Re: Yuck.

Does pro-audio stuff on windows require a

real time kernel? I know on Linux a real time kernel is recommended for such workloads

Breath of fresh air: v7.3 of LibreOffice boasts improved file importing and rendering

Re: Does Base finally not suck?

If you know a smattering of Python then Pandas and or the SciPy packages are good for data wrangling in Jupyter.

Jeff Bezos adds some more overheads to his $485m yacht by taking down historic bridge

Smaug? Or was that Smeagol?

More like capitalism’s very own Frankenstein’s monster. No doubt he’ll be looking to save a few euro’s on unnecessary staffing for this bridge deconstruction project... the first time civil engineers in such a project were required to wear a comfort break tracker.

Worried about occasional npm malware scares? It's more common than you may think

Surprised?

Seriously, no real surprise there, npm is the pebble dashed brick outhouse of the software development community. Some more than others feel the need to visit it on a semi-regular basis. Lord knows why.

GPU makers increasingly disengage from crypto miners

Meh

Nvidia and AMD are both playing games, the GPU shortages were certainly benefitting someone. Witness the retail price hikes. Either way there are a lot of amps going up in waste heat, adding measurably to energy demand and dependent on the mode of generation.. potentially adding significantly to global warming. What’s unclear is what happens to crypto fortunes when quantum (or photonics) comes of age.

In the '80s, spaceflight sim Elite was nothing short of magic. The annotated source code shows how it was done

Magic indeed

Oh the hours spent marvelling at this apparent miracle, 32kb of pure joy.

The inside story of ransomware repeatedly masquerading as a popular JS library for Roblox gamers

No....de

Reads NPM, rolls eyes, sighs, gets downvoted by the global coalition of NodeJS developers, wistfully remembers a time when the delete key paved a way home from NPM Hell. Never again kiddies

Keep calm and learn Rust: We'll be seeing a lot more of the language in Linux very soon

Seconds out, round two

Nothing like an article making (possibly inflated) claims about a language to rekindle the good ol’ language wars. For myself, it’s probably incentive enough to have another look at rust, but my eyes do tend to glaze over (lack of interest) when OO-zealots start laying out their stall.

Zuck didn't invent the metaverse, but he's started a fight to control it

Goody, goody

One step closer to Sarah Connors nightmare coming true, and skynet ... I mean metaverse taking over

Reg reader returns Samsung TV after finding giant ads splattered everywhere

Reason to

Clearly the advertisers, being soulless prostitutes to capital, won’t be happy till we all check out of digital society and take up a thoroughly analogue hobby ... like whittling spoons. The invasion of advertisers into every space available is certainly driving this one nuts too. We need a charter, some sort of agreement that clearly defines the limitations of acceptable marketing, and most importantly we need consequences for those that breech the agreed limitations.

A Windows 11 tsunami? No, more of a ripple as Microsoft's latest OS hits 5% PC market

Hmmmm

Considering all the coverage the latest M$ offering is receiving, including the fanboy worship, you could be forgiven for expecting better numbers... hardware requirements?? Did anyone else see a news article claiming M$ were relaxing the door policy (TPM requirements)

Twitter's algos favour tweets from conservatives over liberals because they generate more outrage online – study

Another explanation

Being attention-whores conservative politicos often post deliberately inflammatory content leading to higher retweet rates from outraged observers. Just one of many alternatives I expect.

SpaceX Starship struts its stack to show it has the right stuff

Chemistry lesson too

Scandinavian farmers have long been tapping the excess pig and cow flatulence to power their farms and villages. Carbon dioxide being far less problematic as a greenhouse gas than methane.

It’s Northern European pragmatism in action

THX Onyx: A do-it-all DAC for the travelling audiophile

Re: Loudspeakers

My ears being somewhat elderly, I find 320 kbps CBR mp3 files are virtually indistinguishable from 16 bit 44.1 khz CD. Rick Beato did an episode where he blind tested a young studio engineer with perfect pitch and she couldn't reliably distinguish these either

I found the episode:

Michelle does the test

Re: Same old story...

Audio review

Seems others have been checking for degradation, and indeed you are correct

Your Computer Is On Fire, but it will take much more than this book to put it out

Your computer exploded, imminent, maybe

To be fair the solutions or even recommendations you were hoping for would probably require another book to detail properly.

Dell won't ship energy-hungry PCs to California and five other US states due to power regulations

Re: @45RPM

What a naive response, you must have a perfect toaster that as 45rpm notes doesn’t dissipate energy in the none IR/heat part of the EM spectrum nor does it heat its own components nor any space or items placed above it. The next time you see your 100% efficient toaster you should hold your hand directly above it for the entire duration of a toaster cycle. Do let us know how the experiment went afterwards please.

Doing my bit for the planet

Having recently assembled a new PC, previous one was getting on to 5 years old, I can fully understand California’s issue with the power consumption of mid to high end gaming machines (GPU’s being the chief culprit). Fortunately for me only low end, low power GPU models were available (for sensible money) which helped me do my bit for the environment by making the right choice ;)

UK's National Museum of Computing asks tunesmiths to recreate bleeps, bloops, and parps of retro game music

Re: Captain Pugwash theme was the best

Frak had that tune hidden on it, if you tried a naive approach to bypassing the rudimentary copy protection you were greeted with a blast of trumpet hornpipe aka pugwash theme

I've got a broken combine harvester – but the manufacturer won't give me the software key

Right to fleece

The story here is so familiar. To provide goods at the current price point manufacturers have slashed the margin. This is counterproductive, being part of the reason manufacturers look for other ‘revenue streams’ by for instance locking you in to their parts and servicing. Charged exorbitantly. It doesn’t help of course that many of these corporations are operated by greedy, money grubbing bast***s too.

What is your greatest weakness? The definitive list of the many kinds of interviewer you will meet in Hell

Misty eyed recollections

The point about interviewers and the absence of interview training is so true. If only interviews weren't necessary, I've had some real corkers including a full day with 2 conducted tours, passed around 4 heads of department for a 'friendly chat' before the grand finale... a panel interview with 3 people taking turns at asking questions while the rest take notes and sharpen their knives. If your lucky they may all join in for the extra fun. This was the mid-late 1980's, but apparently it can still happen these days... hint.. hint.. Amazon.

Windows 11 comes bearing THAAS, Trojan Horse as a service

WTH

What business does a web browser (edge), a business communications platform (teams), and a games store (Xbox game bar) have in an operating system?? They may paint themselves as the cuddly fluffy bunny business that loves open source, but much of their behaviour hasn't changed much since the early days.

Lest we forget, embrace, extend, extinguish

A beefy Linux 5.14-rc2 and light at the end of the tunnel for Paragon's NTFS driver

Happy days

Excellent news, the next time I see a user in my favourite Linux forum complaining that they cannot synchronise their NTFS partitions I'll point them at 5.14-RC2.

SAP uses Scalpel to carve shape of post-Brexit UK ambitions

As one AC to another

The Grauniad has a few euro skeptics too, but yep generally speaking you're right (oops nearly gave the game away then ;) )

If you've mastered Python 101, you're probably better at programming than OpenAI's prototype Codex

You P45 is ready at reception, byeeee

Funnily they swerved the ultimate goal for this tech. Reduce the number of actual programmers required by unspecified organisations. That goal appears way off, but that doesn’t mean it’ll never happen.

It’s curious that they’re training with a high level abstraction like python (created for humans), wouldn’t it be better to train with compiled machine code. There wouldn’t be obscure syntactical elements to get in the way. I’m probably missing something.

Google herds FLoC back to the lab for undisclosed post-third-party-cookie ad tech modifications

Whatever happened to W3C

I’ve taken my eye of the ball, but it sounds increasingly likely that everyone involved in the process of creating web standards is there to line their pockets and no one represents us.

UK arm of international charity the Salvation Army hit by ransomware attack

Holy guacamole

Do members of the later day IT scourge have to wear special under garments... underpants of the scourge

When free and open source actually means £6k-£8k per package: Atos's £136m contract with NHS England

Quelle suprise

Well colour me shocked, outsourced IT support probably costs more when exorbitant fees for such free software installation is considered. I’ll bet it’s the tip of a very large iceberg too.

America world’s sole cyber superpower, ten years ahead of China, says Brit think tank

Really?

Has anyone else noticed the contradiction and possibly the conceit? The contradiction being to describe such an organisation as a think tank having made a conceited assumption that such an organisation is well placed to judge international cyber capabilities. Did they send in well intentioned letters requesting details of each nation states offensive and defensive capabilities. I'm sure the answers on a post card would be truthful and complete. Or did they assume that everything that goes on is reported in national dailies? Where was this group when Russia spent the best part of a year rifling through all the top US government agencies computer systems, unnoticed.

We hope this hotel has a nice spa because Windows sure looks like it needs some R&R

Putting Windows in charge of a public display board is asking for trouble, no doubt a technically illiterate polyester suit thought that an advertising/public information board required access to the internet, an email account, and spreadsheets to function as a slide show... epic fail. Keep these coming please, they always brighten my day.

Happy with your existing Windows 10 setup? Good, because Windows 11 could turn its nose up at your CPU

That’s interesting \s

Big assumption being that we would be interested in the ride on M$ Windowze 10.11

You won't want that Linux bling if it comes from Pling: Marketplace platform has critical vulnerabilities

Unresponsive maintainer, RCE, good job I don’t subscribe to this fluff. Sounds like a hipster thing from here

Backbench Tory campaigner promises judicial review of data grab of English GP patients unless UK government changes tack

Once in a while

Every now and then Davies makes perfect sense, and crosses party lines in a way that most can support him. I hope he wins this little scrap.