Posts by that one in the corner 5492 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2021
> what was the objective of the DEL *.* command?
TFA> used the only command he knew
Objective: showing off literally the only thing he knew.
So, from your list, "ineptitude" is the best fit. Although, the desire of a manager to meddle does appear to be part of the pact they sign with an "evil 3rd party"*
* snappy dresser, often in red to match the colour of the "ink" used on the contract.
> but there used to be some fairly wacky naming choices in there ... a nonstandard pile more
That is most likely just the old list of colour names from X11, which is still in all the browsers I've used (so far) and used in all sorts of other places: even the FastLED library for making blinky lights provides that list of colours. The names are very well known, a de-facto standard, and likely to hang around forever.
Now, if you wanted "wacky" names, petition to get the xkcd colour name survey added into HTML.
My Ghod, what a horrific idea.
Everyone having equal access to the AI*. AI usage that isn't purely aimed at keeping the shareholders rich.
That could** lead to the worst of all possible outcomes. Freely available answers to everyone's questions, sharing of knowledge, an educated populace, maybe even, no, no, the concept is simply too vile to imagine, it can't, it mustn't, start us on the road to a post-scarcity world!
* whether that is actually useful is another question, of course, but see**
** for various values of "could"; remember, we're peaking inside the mind of an AI CTO, who is, at least on paper, a True Believer in what his magic box can do
Subversion: a better CVS.
Oh, the bliss of using something designed with all its functionality in a library, that can be used by custom tools, after the - experience - of using CVS from the first version, literally (as Bitsminer says) a layer of scripts on top of RCS) through to it getting its own executable...
Why not just open a locally stored webpage on it?
Or, if the browser dislikes running from files, a local web server, serving up those files?
Or, for the Register readers who already gave a separate server running, point it at a page served from there.
Or, instead of porting X11, go the lightweight route and install a VNC client; there are a variety of things you can then do at the server end (it need not be a screen share).
Or, ...
Yes, even an X11 server.
> Please point out where I even suggested "only"?
By giving
>> You mean "until the driver decides they don't".
as a correction to
>>> It is like saying that guardrails will keep cars on the road. And they do, until they don't.
The >>> quote leaves entirely open the cause of whatever happens that the guardrails fail to protect against. Your line, in the >> quote, does absolutely nothing, has no reason to exist, OTHER than to close down the possible causes. In this case, to just the driver.
If you intended us to believe that there are other possible causes, your options were to not post the comment at all, leaving all possibilities still open, or to mention more than just the one you did. However, you deliberately mention JUST the driver and even go further, that the driver has made a conscious decision to do so. Adding both together strongly increase the implication that it is the driver, and only the driver, that would be involved in deliberately crashing through the guardrails.
> go down to the first floor, walk behind the building
Intern goes down to first floor, steps outside to begin walk - WOOOaaarrgghhh THUMP - limp* around building.
* thankfully landing in greenery softened the landing; ok, it was the carefully cultivated nettles that Simon was growing around all the infrastructure access points to discourage the PHB from having a peek, but PFY has a supply of Calamine Lotion.
WTF?
They've JUST realised that having a version number is useful?
And that a stateless protocol will scale better?
I thought these were supposed to be the "digital natives", the ones who've been swimming in the sea of HTTP(S) all their lives, who are supposed to have some intuitive understanding of how these work.
Not like us whitebeards, who are so out of touch that we have to actually use books (can you imagine, books!) to see how these things are done.
Still, there is an up side: with the stories like Anthropic attacking Hugging Face, just imagine what horrors we'd face if any of these people were actually competent.
> you could have made a search to educate yourself
And from the very next comment after yours (which mirrors my experience)
>> I was going to joke about looking it up on Google, but I just did, and it's a complete shitshow over there
Can we take it that the youngster Pascal did not bother trying the search before deriding someone else, possibly not a native speaker? A somebody who actually admitted their ignorance and posed a straightforward question about it?
Korev: good on you for asking. The most important phrase in English: "I do not know". Second most important being "Let's go find out" or, if you think there is a good chance somebody already knows, "Can you tell me ...?".
Trouble is, the brown dwarves are "not really burning, just getting a bit smokey". If a solar system were the bottom of the garden, a star would be the bonfire, consuming inside it, a planet the newly mown grass piled up and a brown dwarf the compost heap that lets out steam when you poke it.
And Pluto is the old tennis & footie ball that the pets were chewing and now have buried down bottom of garden; IOW Pluto is the dogs' bollocks.
You two have managed to find a fascinating pair of people: "interested" enough in computing to get themselves Register accounts but somehow still terrified of the thought that people are designing & building their own CPUs.
Those two downvoters will have apoplexy if they ever find out what students are expected to do on, say, an FPGA Uni course*
* deeply jealous, as FPGAs were not available during my Uni days, so we had to make do with software emulation, if CPU design was the project we chose. So making one's own VM.
Not at all.
It simply points out that the autonomous gun only fires, by its own choice, at humans who have their own complete autonomy.
That is, in order to reduce incidents of friendly fire, it refuses to target anyone it perceives as acting under orders. This is an AI safeguard to protect the Marines deploying the weapons. There may be side effects to this guardrail, but the manufacturers have a no-sue clause.
> an increased chance of serious injury to a child involved in tumble...
Yes, but it will be the kids they tumble into who will come off worst.
Kids can start on the balance bike and then graduate to the Cyberquad for kids, both of which have lively sharp angles and edges. This way, they can be just like Daddy, who joyfully ploughs through pedestrians in his "will never be road-legal in the developed world" Cybertruck.
> - otherwise why did it just happen to pick a target people have heard of, rather than some Utah city council's site or a third tier Amazon retailer in Kazakhstan?
BECAUSE Hugging Face is well-known! Have you forgotten what these LLMs are doing and what they are trained on?
From TFA:
>> “After gaining Internet access, the models inferred that Hugging Face potentially hosted models, datasets and solutions for ExploitGym
The model was told "ExploitGym". What percentage of training data will mention "ExploitGym" and "Amazon retailer in Kazakhstan" versus "ExploitGym" and "HuggingFace"? Which words are statistically more closely related and hence more likely to appear together in generated output?
Even if the model being run was the simplest LLM, without any form if additional inference or other sensible reasoning techniques tacked in, it would be very odd if it had followed your idea and looked for a Utah council site.
We are both having bad speeling days:
>> This left a lasting impression and to this day, braces are vertically aligned, blick contents one space (not tab!) indented and I use "mark column" along with "find matching brace" all the time...
Yes, "blick" should be "block".
OTOH
> but one space intended and block content don't mix in my brain
One space *indented*, not "intended"!
So if the opening brace happens to be at line 8, column 11, it will be the only thing on that line (except perhaps a comment). The contents of that block, within the braces, are indented to start at line 9, column 12. The closing brace will then be at column 11, whatever line it happens to reach, and be the only thing on that line (bar a comment).
Oh, if you are trying to figure out if column 11 is a possible column for a brace to end up in, it was chosen randomly for this example.
> eg one function 2000+ lines long.
First paid job, worked with C code. The UI stuff was ok, but The Function that processed ALL the data (running up and down graphs percolating values - and no, it wasn't an LLM) was one looong monster.
Eventually resorted to formatting it so that braces were vertically aligned and each block indented in one from there, do I could print it out (thank Ghod for fanfold, so it was all one continuous sheet), laid it out one evening across all the desks in the office and used a metre rule (multiple times per brace pair) with a packet of coloured felt tips: green* blocks aggregate, red blocks store back, blue blocks build backtrace etc etc.
This left a lasting impression and to this day, braces are vertically aligned, blick contents one space (not tab!) indented and I use "mark column" along with "find matching brace" all the time...
* recall of colours used unlikely to be accurate!
Threading was "new"? Threading had been around for decades by then: anybody using microprocessors - or any one of dozens of minicomputers that didn't happen to provide you with a protected multi-tasking environment gave you threads.
> Lindholm realized you could only have the interrupts happen at certain points.
This was news? In 1995? That you have to be careful with your interrupt timing? Gosh, I wonder why CPUs implement interrupt disable/enable instructions. Mutexes, Critical Sections, Semaphores, Rendezvous, etc etc - absolutely none of this was new in 1995!
FFS. The BBC Micro had (what we now call) "threads" implemented in its release of Forth-83. That is, the version of Forth defined in 1983. If you hacked up your own computer, you could use threads across multiple(well, two) cores with the 6502 really nicely, just by swapping the clock phases going to the MPUs (this same trick being what gave the BBC Micro glitch-free graphics, as in that case the video generator ran on the other phase and hence accessed RAM in slots when the CPU couldn't, and vice versa). There was a nice LISP-type machine built with paired 6502s to do just that that.
Hell, C.A.R. Hoare's "Communicating Sequential Processes" even gave a mathematical basis, and a language to use with it, for all the concepts you need to aware of to get this stuff right. In 1978!
OTOH there *were* companies selling compilers that tried to exert their licensing rights over the compiled results of your own source code (and no, not just "you've linked it with our proprietary C library"), because using their transforms somehow transformed the ownership as well.
Who knows what insanity someone is going to try and claim in a court? SCO lawyers, block your ears!
Nobody even knows if it is 50% wastage or 75% or 95%. At best all you get is a chart saying "k doolars spent on advertising this month" plotted against "n revenue dollars increase the same month" and if n is positive, or even greater than k, it must be because of the advertising. We suggest you buy some more.
Of course, if n is negative then it was the wring sort of advertising, you won't be seeing that copywriter again, but here is our latest prodigy, that'll be a 76% price hike for the consulting as you are obviously in a crisis only advertising can help with.
Confounding factors? Que? No, is Siberian Hamster.
This is a screen in a lift. It will be showing only a select number of images that the owner/operator of the screen wants it to show (as suggested, almost certainly advertising). Probably sent to it from some central location, where there is a box that can run some simple image format conversion to makie suitable for this display.
Why on Earth would it need to decode random video files or stream anything from the internet (that wasn't already in its preferred format and, indeed, not initiating a stream by itself but streamed at the device, display this, don't answer back)?
Heck, every time I read a "what do you do with your home server/home lab?" post, just about everyone seems to be plugging in OTT GPUs to transcode videos for streaming to devices about the house; if all the hobbyists can do it (and want to) pretty sure anyone running digital hoardings, if they were price/reliability conscious enough to use minimalist hardware such as Pico instead of a Zero, could also figure out transcoding.
Not that anyone actually running these blasted screens is going to care about being cost efficient (ref the hardware use indicated by TFA) and they are probably making the hotel pay through the nose for the "premium feel of the digital billboard - oops, sorry, digital lifestyle infomatics delivery subsystem.
>> "When the machine starts, the firmware would .... offer the option to enter a setup program... hand over to boot...."
> That doesn't sound like a BIOS, that sounds like a startup menu system.
Flick the Big Red Switch on the side of the PC. Watch for the message "Press DEL to enter setup".[1] If you don't accept the offered option to enter setup, it continues to boot the PC.
Classic PC BIOS behaviour. Which even UEFI has nicked.
[1] precise wording changes from machine to machine, as does whether you are told to press DEL or F1 or F12 or any other random key.
> You do, using mokutil on Linux (there's probably a way to do it on Windows but I'm not sure why one would?). You don't need to install a shim either
If you are going to post a URL, you *might* want to try reading it yourself first; from your selected URL:
>> A key part of the shim design is to allow users to control their own systems. The Debian distro CA key is built in to the shim binary itself, but there is also an extra database of keys that can be managed by the user. The user keys are called Machine Owner Key, or MOK for short.
Notice that word "shim"? Your MOKs are only working with UEFI because of the shim that is installed on your behalf.
> is the most popular MODERN firmware in the world?
And MODERN means unbloated, easy to implement on your interesting new mainboard (being "free to download" is only the tip of the iceberg) and generally sensible?
The most popular, eh? Popular, as in pre-installed, you didn't get a choice? And beloved by companies who are trying to lock down your hardware (remind me again, who gets to install UEFI keys? What was that, it isn't an issue because you can use a shim to boot your free OS? Adding a shim is good, unbloated, design, eh?
If neat, small, RISC-V BIOS arrives and is taken up, then *that* will become the MODERN thing!
You hand your task over to the big LLM; CFO sees token cost, finally realises it isn't cost effective.
Trim task down, hand it to self-hosted cloud LLM; CFO sees electric bill & rack capex, finally realises it isn't cost effective.
Trim task down, run it on PC-hosted NPUs; CFO sees forced laptop refresh cycle in the RAMpocalypse, realises it isn't cost effective.
Sysop & sane half of dev team wave 20 line shell script in the air, wondering what they have to do to actually get CFO to listen, for once, please.
> the new problem is that it's almost redundant with this one.
Send it in anyway; if El Reg has such a slim slush pile it gets it go too soon you can point out other commentards need to step up to get the variety. Otherwise, in x months/years time there will be a new set of wet-behind-the-ears readers who'll benefit.
The old guard will complain that they've heard that story before, but we always do. Then we'll fall asleep in our rocking chairs again. 'Til them durn kids get on the lawn agin, anyways.
> The first hit destroyed the PCB making data retrieval almost impossible
A few years back, the magic smoke came out of the controller chip of one of my hard drives, wrecking the PCB quite nicely. That weekend, popped over to a local junk parts sale, bought a handful of "dead" drives. Few minutes with a screwdriver, tada, fully working hard drive. Unless by "PCB" you mean the tiddly one on the inside which just carries a bit of decoupling - but even then, swappable. The drive won't run long if you don't have a clean room, but doable in a techie workshop to get a backup off.
> but a bit more targetted hammering on the bearings finished the job.
Now you've put it into "data recovery firm with decent clean room" territory; tricky, but a quick thumbing through the Yellow Pages...
You really need to do a number on the platters if you want to render a drive unreadable. Drill presses (see other comments) are fun, but if you don't have easy access to one of those, a quiet evening with a set of screwdriver bits from Maplins will get the thing apart. THEN smack the platters once - if they shatter, job done, otherwise 12V into the motor and sandpaper: you can hear the bits screaming, mwahaha.
You open a message that someone sent you the URL for (not a good start) and glaze over trying to decipher what it says (wondering all the while why you ever open that idiot's email, let alone follow their links). Thirty minutes later, you are startled awake and find that whilst your head was gently nodding your device has been scrolling through the infinite message feed. For the next month your ads and suggestions are all about choosing the best nit comb and how to deal with knotted hair on the back of the thigh ("Meet Nit Nurses in your area!"; "I comb you good long time")
* good; feed the nosey creeps all the bad data you can
In the Good Old Days, when we had to hand-carve[1] the UI from individual characters, we were redrawing the scroll bars as well as the body content. So every move you knew that one screen area had to move up whilst the other moved down, or one eent left and the other right, and you were in charge of all of it.
So that gave us, um, 15 ways to mess up reacting to cursor key presses for a screen region!
And, of course, you'd get some clever clogs pointing out that "this is still the early days of the IBM PC, we have to squeeze it all into the 256K[3] our users can afford" and directly calling memcpy() themselves, instead of your fancy-schmanzy ScrollRegionAndUpdsteScrollbars()[4] saved the few bytes of function call setup. So some regions behaved ok but another region on the same display swapped L&R but only for the horizontal scrollbar, whilst...
By 1987 someone had clearly had enough of all this and wrote a useful mantra to remind us all (and the managed to turn *that* into two entire novels!):
East takes you Out; Out takes you West: West takes you In; In takes you East; Port and Starboard bring you back.
[1] The curses library[2] wasn't much help, as it omitted the IBM ROM character sets's box-drawing glyphs
[2] OTOH the curses thesaurus was well-thumbed on these occasions
[3] "640K is enough for anyone" - 640? You flash bastard! Bet you've got a CGA card and monitor as well!
[4] So you spent a couple of days recoding ScrollXxx() as #define macros and trying all the combos to see what the final object sizes looked like. Whilst hunting down the - interestingly brained person[5] - who shuffled the order of objects in each overlay, so suddenly it code-swapped as you changed scroll direction. Oh, how we all laughed.
[5] that *might* have been someone familiar with corners...
