Posts by JamesTGrant

Life lesson: Don't delete millions of accounts on the same day you go to the dentist

Re: LDAP?

Even Microsoft are guilty of this. A cert generated with an old exchange password, can sometimes continue working for hours…. Almost like they don’t check…

Re: Auto-Account Deletion

Tbh - if it wasn’t in Latin you’d quickly come to the conclusion that Cicero was a bit of a knob. (That’s not to say you shouldn’t read him but, compared to the Greek philosophers - he’s ‘self opinionated’…)

Re: Life lesson...

Which question? “If I sit on this chair, will the table collapse?” Is a silly question, only the most churlish carpenter would blame you for trying and not asking.

There are many unknowable things that are unknowable until you know them but you need to know before you know.

UK government pledges law against sexually explicit deepfakes

Re: Wrong move

Sounds great. I’d like to subscribe to the ‘climb after the dive’ optimism but I think the metaphorical plane has much further to dive and I suspect it’ll hit the bottom of the barrel and disintegrate rather than swoop back upwards (to mash a couple of metaphors together).

Elon Musk's galactic ego sows chaos in European politics

Re: Fall of the (Roman) Republic

This is why the comments section is worth a read. Will have a read - sounds very interesting.

Telemetry data from 800K VW Group EVs exposed online

Re: I'll give you my old car keys when you pry it from my cold, dead hands

I think there’s enough time left on that clock to not have to trade in the ol’ jelopy just yet.

Accenture wins £35M more UK tax work without competition despite promise to 'disaggregate'

So Accenture are being paid to make the ‘currently-only-one-vendor-can-maintain-or-develop-this’ software/system more easily maintainable and easier to develop for other competitors in future. And they are late?

Shocked I tell you!!

UK watchdog launches inquiry into IBM's HashiCorp acquisition

‘Merger’ in the way a droplet merges with an ocean.

Screwed by the cloud: Hardware vendors looking for that raison d'refresh

I rather suspect that ‘old infrastructure’ is fulfilling dedicated workloads which, on average, consume a low(ish) percentage of the peak potential CPU throughput (two/three reasons they’d still be alive after 6 years!)

If you care about power consumption then you can allow low power modes/states even in really old HPE servers - the Watts per computed output overhead scales pretty linearly with computed output and provided you don’t need the throughput to be capable of instantly jumping, you can save a load of heat and money.

Boffins ponder paltry brain data rate of 10 bits per second

Ability to absorb complex information from images tops out at 10 images a second (if you are really concentrating hard). Ability to distinguish between separate images and continuous motion is dependent on which part of the eye you are looking with, and how bright the image is (among other things). Film (35mm) is/was 24fps but each frame is shown twice or three times (hence the shutter on a cinema projector) to reduce the ‘flicker’ you’d otherwise notice. (Flicker, not motion judder…)

Flicker is still noticeable for many (not all) at 50 images per second (even if the images are duplicated). The vast majority of people can not detect flicker at 75 images per second when viewing head-on. All of this assumes a duty cycle where the image is displayed very quickly after the previous image.

Note - this isn’t about motion judder, it’s about flicker.

SvarDOS: DR-DOS is reborn as an open source operating system

Re: 2GB

Gah - memories. Stuff them back in the box, deep, deep down.

Are you better value for money than AI?

Obviously the widget seller is expounding the alleged virtues of the widget. It’s as good (better sometimes) as a search engine - and that’s already amazing, but it isn’t what is now being touted. What is now being touted is (politely) wishful thinking.

In my work I see people doing complex tasks in series using a computer that could be automated using BASH/Python/tcl/whatever but the person doing the task (which requires a good level of domain knowledge) isn’t proficient at any computing scripting language sufficiently not to get tied up in proverbial knots and so they get the job done in the way they know how, in the time it takes.

Imagine I was sat next to them with full context awareness and could provide them with the scripting to do the job. Would it work? Yes. Would it be helpful? No. They still have no competence in the script/programme and now there’s a new artefact that needs looking after and maintaining.

As is pretty obvious to any non-sociopath business leader, the right thing to do is to invest in people to ensure you can keep up skilling whilst there are enough people to do the actual job. And keep enough people, or don’t do that job.

Once the pressure is on to get things out in a hurry and there isn’t enough time/people, then people can’t upskill or learn new things which could eventually allow them to become ‘faster’ in the future because the time between now and eventually is too great for the short termism and the output can’t be slowed down. Eventually this part of a business dies.

One third of adults can't delete device data

Re: Workstations, laptops.....

If you store all the fat 0s as 1s then you save loads of space and it’s easy to decrypt by remembering which ones you changed and then change them back when you need to.

Fund my startup?

Re: A Pedant Writes

Was going to add: nothing gathers dust in a drawer. Unless it’s permanently open, but that’d be a tray or a box…

Microsoft coughs up yet more Windows 11 24H2 headaches

Re: HDR

Hey Neil. A non-HDR display has a peak brightness of some value and a colour gamut of whichever ITU standard. An HDR display has a much brighter peak brightness and a wider colour gamut (but not equal increase in each vector). (BTW - every real-world domestic HDR display is not capable of reproducing the peak brightness across the entire display, but that’s ok - if it could you’d deffo not want to look at it when it did…)

Simply linear scaling luma from non-HDR to HDR produces pictures that are generally far too bright, such that you turn down the display luminance and so can’t visually resolve anything in the grey-black range. Similarly with chroma, linear factor scaling makes the colours look strange.

There are a few very convincing conversion curves (not machine learning), many are patented, some are not patented. The good ones look very impressive. Not as consistently ‘wow’ as something properly graded in HDR but impressive and visually more immersive than non-HDR.

-From a (very recently) former engineer at the company which made the first real-time broadcast MPEG-2 video encoder and receiver (and pretty much the earliest real-time broadcast H.264/AVC (MPEG-4) HD video encoder).

Asda decided on a 'no go' for 'mass rollout' of store IT conversion

Re: Who is running the project?

7 8 9 Dec looks dodgy boss.

Let’s do it a couple of weeks later.

Yes, the week before Christmas, please sign here.

Seems like an originally bad idea was ‘brinkmanshiped’ into the new year.

Infosys founder calls for 70-hour work week – again – claiming it creates jobs

Everyone works 70hrs a week. Birthday rate collapses, healthcare tanks, children grow up never seeing their parents, there’s no art, no travel. Sounds like a horrible society. One assumes this fella is capable of extrapolating the likely out working of his ideas. I can only assume he hates (other) people.

Trump administration wants to go on cyber offensive against China

Re: Look in the mirror

You’re back! Hello VoT and handler!

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

Re: Tounge in cheek?

Jake is on a farmstead, I like to imagine a mill, a hydroelectric dam, maybe a few windmills, some panels on a barn or two. Basically I think it’s a cross between ‘All Creatures Great and Small’ and Gene Hackman’s place in ‘Enemy of the State’.

Red Rabbit Robotics takes human form to sell work as a service

At the moment it doesn’t do anything you’d want and it’s really expensive and it will get in the way, and take ages to do the thing. But trust us, it’ll be great really soon. Also it can do lots of diagnostic tests from a single drop of blood!

'Tis the season to test the RHEL and AlmaLinux 10 betas

Re: Who Is This Discussion Aimed At?

Answer: People making a choice between RHELand something else. The RHEL10 Frankenkernel will diverge (immediately) from LTS and it will be very difficult/time consuming to determine the deltas between LTS and Franken6.11 - it’ll be a very very long list of fixes that all sound scary with no obvious counterpart in LTS. Which will mean:

Money for RHEL - they just love fixing up old kernel versions - particularly if the fix is already available in other source code and needs porting and slightly modifying to fit the Frankenkernel, thus making it not exactly the same. Far too scary to migrate. Kerching

Uncertainty for folk moving away from RHEL from a kernel feature/compatibility/security perspective, and more money for RH (IBM) (see previous!)

systemd begrudgingly drops a safety net while a challenger appears, GNU Shepherd 1.0

Re: GNU Shepherd

nice!

Is there a HURD/herd/shepherd pun in there? I’m trying to make it work but it’s a bit of a stretch.

SAP says GenAI will help solve legacy migration skills shortage

Robinson also said SAP had "engineered out" much of the complexity of on-prem architectures. "We've abstracted away all of the underlying infrastructure, architectural analysis and management. [Customers are no longer] required to maintain an entire area of expertise around infrastructure and capacity planning at a very tedious technical level," he said.

I think he means ‘wish we had engineered out’ and ‘a very essential technical level’

Google DeepMind touts AI model for 'better' global weather forecasting

In rural China it was/is fairly common to keep a ‘weather loach’ (a bit like a 6inch fat eel) in a large jar. When it’s calm - the weather would be fine, if it was particularly wiggly then bad weather was on the way.

I kept a couple and they were great fun - until they escaped and died on the floor. Can remember what weather that was supposed to foretell.

Re: I am really not used to people admitting to stupidity but it is refreshingly different

Quick reminder - you’re arguing on a faceless comment section on a website on the Internet… Hope your day gets better.

Euro cloud body heads off to Microsoft's HQ to check it's keeping promises

The only certain diagnosis a doctor can give: ‘I’m sorry to tell you, you are going to die’

Also, merry Christmas!

Wubuntu: The lovechild of Windows and Linux nobody asked for

Re: 2D FLATTY FLATASS FLATSO look still there - **WHY**???

Hi Bob!!

Altman to Musk: Don't go full supervillain – that's so un-American

‘It would be profoundly un-American to use political power to hurt your competitors and advantage your own businesses’

Bwahahaha. That guy!

Elementary OS 8 'Circe' conjures Wayland magic

Re: The easy life

Nutrition is more important than flavour, but I still want my meals to be tasty. It’s not unreasonable to have both…

Open source router firmware project OpenWrt ships its own entirely repairable hardware

Re: The DFS* Sale Is Now On!

There’s an interesting backstory - when DFS and its ilk started, the existing furniture shops were very low volume high cost, often with actual workshops and skilled craftsmen and typically in small shops in expensive high street locations.

DFS are essentially a shop front for a logistics company that specialises in importing from factories in Asia in cost efficient ways.

They reasoned (correctly) that they could borrow the prestige of having ‘normal’ prices but capture the market by selling at a far lower price. These days, the old price seems ridiculous - what was innovative has become anachronistic.

Chinese boffins find way to use diamonds as super-dense and durable storage medium

Not sure I’m ever likely to complain about any tech I’m using if it ceases to be useful after being stored at 200degC

I don’t think I’d work properly if I was stored at 200degC

NASA wants ideas on how to haul injured moonwalkers

Yes. It is.

Make the spaces suits out of Velcro - thick strips of the 3M industrial grip stuff alternating hook and loop. Colleague injured? Lay on them to pick em up and then romp on back to base. £35k to me please!

Both KDE and GNOME to offer official distros

Well, I’ve just had two weeks off work. So… two weeks ago. For example, most recently, I installed XFCE 4 on a nice new Ubuntu and I thought it was comedically poor - lots of rough edges.

Not talking about Windows update (broken forever), talking about the UI and the experience of using the UI. I abandoned Windows about a year ago and replaced my well specified work laptop (running Windows 10 pro) for a much cheaper and far better (imo) Mac Mini - from my own pocket. BTW - Windows desktop has got worse in many respects since Windows 7 in my opinion. Lots about Windows 7 (file copy/paste over network shares for example) wasn’t perfect. But it was generally a consistent WIMP experience with consistent idioms and design language - the windowing worked, subsample rendering worked, monitor/resolution worked well.

I think ElementaryOS and Mate are nearly there, as they have been for ages!!

I can hear Liam rolling his eyes. Yet another project expanding past its usefulness and yet another distro. Ghha.

The Linux desktop experience STILL hasn’t matched Windows 7 level of ‘this is fine’. I wonder if people who work on these enjoy the lower levels and GUI and UI layer exposure to the human eyeball are sort of ‘boring’?

Abstract, theoretical computing qualifications are turning teens off

Re: WYF!

You can tell the difference between a normie and a vi/emacs user’s keyboard…

A normal person has a bit of wear on the letters on their keyboard but only in the middle.

Vi/emacs have pristine letters but all the keys around the edge of the keyboard are worn away.

Microsoft reboots Windows Recall, but users wish they could forget

Re: the storage packing up completely

I was thinking: mmm blocking.

I can’t think of a reason not to have a thread for screen capture (capture,sleep,repeat) and a thread for analysis (if new cap(s), analyse).

Presumably it runs Postgres or similar.

Analysis thread low priority.

How Microsoft can mess this up is amazing - reboot to fix? Erm - what!!

Trump taps border hawk to head DHS. Will Noem's 'enthusiasm' extend to digital domain?

Imagine a perfect hyperbole follow-through and cybersecurity is South Dakota’s next big industry. There are about 0.5 million unemployed in the state.

Which is roughly the total number of unfilled jobs in the sector nationally. (About 1million in the sector in total)

South Dakota’s total population (1million)

So it’s conceivable that following an enormous turnaround of education and opportunity in the state - and a wholesale social transformation, cybersecurity could be a major employment prospect for a person in South Dakota…

Cybercriminal devoid of boundaries gets 10-year prison sentence

I’m a liberal kind of guy. But 3.5 years seems far too lenient.

Asda security chief replaced, retailer sheds jobs during Walmart tech divorce

Half a BILLION to do some software? That’s ASDA price.

Alphabet posts big revenue and profit growth, just 1,100 job losses

Ctrl+a, right click, ‘auto generate doc and readme’. Boom - 25% of what is checked in is auto generated. Good? Perhaps, perhaps not. Fast? Certainly.

Polish radio station ditches DJs, journalists for AI-generated college kids

It’s probably temporary… but we fired the humans and they won’t be back?

The open secret of open washing – why companies pretend to be open source

Can anyone access the source code? Yes? Well that’s great it’s but if it’s licensed such that you can’t then do anything with it, what’s the point? Except to say ‘Open Source’. As in ‘world-readable source code’.

IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4, argues APNIC's chief scientist

Re: Opinions do differ

Switching using bitmask ‘scopes’. IPv6 uses the ‘subnet’ approach to determine where to switch a packet. A GUID would be unique in every regard relative to another GUID so the switching table would need to know about every packet and the implementation underneath couldn’t be a simple bitmask.

Pentagon stumped by mystery drone swarm flying over Langley Air Force Base

So they couldn’t pop up their own drone and follow the swarm home? They couldn’t pop up a drone to spear-attach a tracker? Seems unlikely.

Also, this was the plot of an episode of NCIS Los Angeles.

Arrow Lake splashdown: Intel pins hopes on replacement for Raptors

Re: Making a prediction...

I was thinking the same thing but then the L3 cache is shared across all cores with a new implementation. Also they have called it ‘Intel Smart Cache’ which invites very predictable article titles. That’s probably where the side-channel shenanigans will start - is my guess!

Harvard duo hacks Meta Ray-Bans to dox strangers on sight in seconds

Re: Brilliant!

Wetwear errata - brilliant. I keep filing reports with the manufacture but so far, I’ve yet to receive an understandable response.

If you're excited by that $1.5B Michigan nuke plant revival, bear in mind it's definitely a fixer-upper

Sounds like a few trips to B&Q on a Saturday afternoon. A few lengths of PEX pipe, a few packs of speedfit, a few cups of tea, pour in some nuclear Furnox, and job’ll be a good’un.

AI agent promotes itself to sysadmin, trashes boot sequence

My guess is it didn’t know it had finished the task. I guess it is aimply scraping from stdout and asking the LLM ‘I did this x and got this y, what should I do’ - the LLM will jump on anything in the input that it can latch onto even if it’s orthogonal to the original ask - the context has shifted so it’s no longer doing the original thing.

I don’t think this will ever work well enough to do anything remotely complex the requires more than a few sequential actions. LLMs are baked in with behind the scenes instructions like ‘try and give an answer even if the input seems contradictory or incorrect’ and ‘assume the questioner knows better than you’ which leads to bonkers output. Subsequently it probably won’t say ‘that’s not related to the original question so you should do nothing’ it assumes there is a question that must be answered.

Trying to ‘re-bias’ the LLM won’t work - like piling slightly different sized circles on top of each other trying to get an eclipse - something will poke out. Even the perfect corollary to a ‘guardrail’ will cause it’s own peculiarities.