Posts by that one in the corner 5493 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2021
What if the nuclear device was owned by the Scouts (that is the US Scouts; over here he'd be a tad old to still be in the Boy Scouts) or the Brownies?
Can a legal minor commit an Act of War[1]?
[1] tried g**gling that but didn't get any good answers, and none that I'd want to put on my insurance claim)
> It is actually a separate 32bit x86 CPU with its own operating system.
The OS is Minix, making this one of the most widely deployed operating systems on the planet.
There was coverage of this back in 2017, when details about the insides of IME were dug out
(Although read that article with care - it keeps on trying to demonise Minix, when all of the criticisms it makes are just because the source to IME isn't open, leading to a lot of "could" rather than "has been shown to do"; the same article could have written if the IME was found to be running any other non-GPL embeddable OS).
> You don't really believe that it is possible to get acceptable data speeds using an internal antenna on a phone that's communicating with a moving target several hundred miles in the air, do you?
Of course not.
Which is why you wear the 5G Silver[1] Sat Gloves, a stylish accessory for the Modern Road Warrior. An app will show how to hold the phone in between the tops of your wrists as you arrange your fingers into a parabola focussed on the antenna. Best results are to be had if you practice smoothly rotating your hips to follow the satellite track across the sky.
For the follically challenged gentleman, a paint-on coating is also available, which places the focus just under the chin. Sadly, this does mean you have to perform a handstand if you are too close to the equator (more moderate climes allow you to relax on a lounger with you feet in the air).
[1] Gold also available, as an upgrade.
> He requested an expedited visa to enter the USA, which was denied.
However:
After that cancelled session, he was not invited again:
> Virt-P2V, which we described as ... sends it to a conversion host system, which then wraps it up to run in a KVM virtual machine.
> Well, it was a dozen years ago. Times have moved on ... introduced that tool's more contemporary sibling,
Um, ah, how to put this...
Virt-v2v *is* the software running on the "conversion host system". IOW in order to run the "older" Virt-P2V you first need to be running the "more contemporary" Virt-v2v as a server!
Virt-v2v is a lot more capable now than it was twelve years ago and it is definitely worth knowing about using it not as a server process, but as a command to convert between formats, however it has been there all these years, as the powerhouse that lets Virt-P2V work at all.[1]
[1] Actually, I rather wish they *were* separate, so then you could boot an ISO then into Virt-P2V to create the VM files with nothing more than some (separate) drive space to store them. But now, as then, you do need to get a copy of Virt-v2v running in a second machine, which just isn't as convenient. First-world problems, eh.
> "Full Manhattan Project" and actually build a craft capable of reaching it in time.
That definitely needs to be Orion, to fulfill both those criteria.
No, not that one, this, older, one.
And when it reaches the rock, it is the design that is actually equipped to deal with it (no, not blow it into pieces, that still leaves pretty much the same amount of rock, and energy, on a collision course; Bruce Willis wasted his sacrifice): push it off to the side.
Just don't stand near the launch site; you thought Starship could tear up the pad...
> wildly different to what we know or expect
The changes over that - or any - time period don't *have* to lead to 'wildly different" creatures; if the path leading to sentient cats digging up McDonalds is a survivable strategy across 40 million years time, that is a route evolution can happily take.
> animals (if they still exist)
Unless there is a total wipeout of life, not "just" an extinction level event, "animals" are highly likely to still exist in 40 million years - the basic idea of "animal" has already been here a *lot* longer than that! After all, we often say that cockroaches will inherit the world (although my money is on tardigrades, huge monstrous tardigrades, almost a centimetre long!)
> The scientists and engineers who warned
And the rock star & film maker who joined in with the warning.
"I'm a shooting star, leaping through the sky"
> "the personal intelligence system that puts powerful generative models right at the core of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac,"
>> "Sounds ghastly"
PS
If any yanks would like to get their hands on an EU, Apple Intelligence-free iThing, give us a bell, usual number, usual fees, and I'll pop over La Manche and chuck one in le post to you. Guaranteed pukkah.
[1] not trying to imply that Apple devices have a smug air about them, heaven forfend.
Ahem.
> "But on the way up Oxford Street you encounter a group of Vegan Crossfit enthusiasts who are in a piano accordion ensemble. After consulting the internet and not being able to find a local gun shop
James Purdey and Sons, bespoke shotguns and hunting rifles; South Audley Street, less than one mile from Oxford Street.
There may be - lesser - establishments closer to hand, but if a gentleman is not willing to take a stroll past Mayfair...
Although, given the details of this sordid tale, one may find Mr Purdey (senior) a tad reluctant to serve at such an hour, at least not without a proper appointment being agreed beforehand.
> not that anybody really does the X protocol directly across the network any more...
Oh, I dunno. I tend to take the attitude that if you are snooping on the traffic across the wired LAN in my study and attic to poach the unencrypted X11 traffic that occasionally flies around, I have far worse problems to deal with.
> I have written one [pure X11 app] myself, as it happens, which wasn't as horrific as some posters on here would have you believe (although the documentation is, um, "terse", to say the least).
Terse? It came in a honking great fat tome[1] for Xlib! Plus another tome each for the basic toolkit, the User's guide, the Admin guide - at least 8 books in the series (My First O'Reilly Books, before the Great Plague of Animal Covers).
If they'd been any less terse, more chatty and fun to read, one loose bookshelf and you'd never survive the avalanche!
[1] clearly fans of Laurie Taylor: "one of these days I'm going to write a book, and it'll be thick enough to stun an ox"
> I wonder if you were using modern hardware and/or multiple graphics cards?
Can not speak for the person you actually addressed that question to, but I (reasonably) recently built a new PC, running Devuan and X11. It didn't need any help from me to find the single new, big (to me) monitor. Nor when I plugged in the two old ones as well (aside from the obvious "this is to the left of that"), nor did it need anything from me when I plugged in a second GPU a short while later (with its own monitor). It even coped fine when I took away the first GPU again to pass through into VMs.
I've loads of notes on what I did wrong fiddling manually with all of the above (hey, do I get better results with open or proprietary nVidia drivers? Oops, that was the wrong block of incomprehensible numbers to pass through the correct GPU) but the windows kept on appearing...[1]. Ok, maybe a reboot was needed when I really messed up.
[1] to my amazement, as I do remember all the fun that could be had decades before; somewhere I still have some very thick tomes of X11 manuals from Foyles 'cos who had drive space to keep that lot online?
So now purging tmp files is the duty of an Init system, not, say, a cron job with the cleaner of your choice?[1]
Or am I just so totally out of touch that I've not realised that Init means "every single second of your system's runtime, even when it is running stably" and not just that bit at the beginning with all the messages on the console?
[1] and far simpler ones than this beast, according to its manpage. Although, some of those options do look really useful, if you find that the rest of the Init keeps dying 'cos the processes invoked keep messing up their own files/dirs and need them to be quickly recreated before said process is started. Not that anything in a systemd based setup would ever need such patching, would it?
So, we will have to learn to talk to these things using some kind of pseudo-natural language, following a set of rules that the researchers formalise for us; if we get it right then the machines will do what we are hoping for, but if we make mistakes then we can expect to get nonsense results back.
Hmm, that concept rings a bell; didn't we use to have a word for that, before the LLMs made the whole idea redundant. On the tip of my tongue, began with a 'p'? Prog, prog - prog rock?
Still, at least all the models will behave the same way, so we only have to learn one formalism to use with all of them. What? Those rules only applies to Microsoft's LLM? I have to learn another to use Google's? And it'll all change next month when the LLMs are updated?
> LED headlights ... have a much longer life than the older halogen or xenon bulbs they replaced
Well, unless they "accidentally" overdrive them, under cool them and shorten their working life.
Big Clive has a few telling videos about reducing the power for all sorts of bright LED lighting, resulting in extended lifetimes (like, the life you'd expect an LED to have) with no significant loss of lighting effect from the p.o.v. of the human eye (the advantage of log versus linear responses).
> cutting edge SystemD uses Win3 type INI files with square brackets as section separators
And?
It is easy and simple to parse, and will get the job done is all you need is basic <key,value> pairs with a bit of structure (sections) if you want. If you *need* a deeply-nested structure with lots of arrays and structs on the 'value' side then there are other, more complex formats available. But aren't most (if not all) of the arguments against systemd because it keeps going the complex route?
Are you railing against it *purely* because Windows is the most obvious originator of the format, therefore it can never be a Proper Linux Solution? But it appears all over the place - doesn't that Git config file look suspicious?
No love here for systemd (Devuan FTW etc, as noted as far back as, oooh, Friday) but being catty about INI file format really seems like scraping the barrel for things to criticise it for.
>> You don't think, perhaps, that this is just a marketing mockup?
> No, I don't think it's just a marketing mockup. I think (as per the subject line) that it's one of those endless silly stock photos of Photoshopped keyboards
So this photoshopped photo is NOT a mockup done by marketing?
In that case, who is doing the photoshopping and releasing them in marketing materials - the tealady? Sneaking it onto the website whilst passing around the digestives, distracting the head of marketing with an artfully placed chocolate bourbon as he is asked to agree their final layout?
Hmm, a shot of just one corner of the keyboard. Done in a rather stylish fashion, with a large aperture and a well-manicured finger in shot. Not exactly an engineering specs quality photograph.
You don't think, perhaps, that this is just a marketing mockup?
Or, if it it does really look like that, that it could just be a funky marketing label applied to an otherwise perfectly normal shift key?
> And no-one needs so-called "AI"
The NPUs are just more compute in your box.
Believing that they are only usable for the much-hyped LLMs is a failure of the imagination: consider that GPUs were only ever talked about in terms of FPS in Doom, or shading models in Tetris 3D[1].
But we know full well that GPUs were long used for other number-crunching, encouraged by things like CUDA to ease use and Numpy/CuPy to make it even easier to apply in your own field.
Even if you stick to running ML (or even just neural nets) on these things, there are other models than LLMs (especially intetesting given that even TLA gives this laptop's NPU's performance a sneering report as "not much compared to...". As noted in other comments, this week I am mostly interested in Birdnet, 'cos it is fun.
Of course, if you are sure you have absolutely no use for any of this, then, yes, "being forced" to buy and run them is a waste of resources.
Although, running them - hmm, looking at temperatures and the power pulled by my PC, it almost looks as though it is reducing power and shutting off units inside the CPU that are not in use at the moment. Funny, that.
Generally, I don't subscribe to the catastrophism heard in these comments that you will be "forced" to buy them and they will never be of any use to you; yes, everyone and his dog is boasting about how their latest high-end CPUs have this built in, but you do not have to buy the biggest. Okay, if you have chosen to go with a specific manufacturer and they *only* supply supply the biggest NPU they can foist on you, then you are not going to get a perfect fit for your desires all the time, but, hey, who does? Maybe reconsider the choice if it is too painful.
"But Windows will force this onto you" - and haven't we seen, in The Register, a long history of MS being a right pain in the arse and someone then showing you how to apply some Preparation-M to ease the suffering?
[1] sorry, I know very little about video games - remember the discussions but the actual games aren't memorable to me
PPS
> Just get on and release a Pi PC, without any AI BS wasting cycles/amps.
So, the Raspberry Pi 400.
Or is this just a complaint that they've not released a Pi 500 fast enough after the Pi 5?
Sorry, I seriously do not understand why people demand that the Pi has to become a boring old PC, with one specific model released from the manufacturer, and lose the "choose the bits you want to assemble what fits you best" that we've had right from the beginning.
If you just want a closed black box that happens to run Linux, they exist and have done for ages.
The choice of Ubuntu seems more like a brand-recognition move on the part of DeepComputing, coupled with a "we are cutting edge" from the Ubuntu side.
Once it is out, it'll soon become clear which other distros work - or are moving to work - with the machine (hmmmmm, Devuan, aaaaargh!).
But first, get it into the market with a recognised name attached (and that ain't gonna be Red Hat!)
PS
> If RISC becomes Popular x Chinese, US sanctions will kill it. That's what they are designed to do
Assuming you meant RISC-V and not just any old RISC (or even used-to-be-RISC but seems to have grown a bit over the years) then - you *do* know that it isn't a China-only thing? That it is headquartered in Europe and that the US was recently being ridiculed because they were trying to keep all the RISC-V stuff within their own borders?
The idea that the US sanctions are *designed* to kill off RISC-V is - shall we say, far-fetched? The US would love to have loads and loads of the very bestest RISC-V In The World, just, preferably, only in their bit of the world.
> Seeing AI and the Pi associated is particularly depressing
As you know, the AI on the R'Pi is just an M.2 stick that slides into a generic M.2 carrier HAT; the same sort of HAT onto which you can stick in a *non* AI-oriented M.2 stick.
Given this - that both the HAT and the stick are entirely optional and in no way built in to the Pi 5, should we assume that you have been becoming increasingly more depressed over the years as other, equally entirely optional, HATs have been released that don't happen to match your particular interests? Oh, how you must have shuddered as motor driver HATs appeared, or the sheer absurdity of the Space HAT, as you so desperately waited to do no more than replace your PC.
My bestest laptop runs a 6th gen i5 with a massive 2 cores at 1.9 GHz, with a staggering 8GB of RAM.
And it more than fulfills my needs for a laptop, nicely complementing in portability (under 13 inch screen, btw) the desktop and servers that do any heavy lifting and bulk storage that might be needed.
If you rely on just a laptop to drag around all the time, *this* RISC-V box might not be the one for you, but then there are plenty of other laptops that you'll view with disdain. If you are champing at the bit for a RISC-V laptop then this does show that they are progressing; won't be too long now...
You are over-paying for your mouse-jigglers (especially if you buy, say, a pack of a dozen). An ATTiny 85 on a Digispark board should do the trick.
I really wish that I had thought to plug one in on Weds evening, as it would have prevented Windows from rebooting the PC and knackering some very slow and long downloads, as well as the rest of the overnight jobs I had left running!
So don't go around making it sound like mouse-jigglers are only useful for nefarious purposes.
Blank screen?
You were lucky! We 'ad to cut out 'ole from old piece o'cardboard and hang it on t'pit wall if *we* wanted a blank screen.
In Sundays, management would roll us up longwise and we 'ad to play t'role o'pipes for 'em, rolling down slag heap so as to seem 3D. Though, to be fair, they did warm up teapot in Winter, to stop it sticking and rolling down t'hill before they'd had a cup.
Curses, my 19th century reference has been beaten by a 16th century one (but both during the reign of queens).
Hmm, there must be a relevant quip from Boudica's court; Tacitus was always good for a pithy line, that bit about Veranius harrying the Silurians always gets a chuckle...
He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand.
"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?" So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply "They are merely conventional signs!
"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes! But we've got our brave Captain to thank (So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best— A perfect and absolute blank!"
(With apologies for the formatting)
> ... it's missing a critical piece of information:
Is even 0.001 TOPS vaguely relevant to your daily workload of running Word and PowerPoint?
(Wanna bet someone else is going to ask the same question again soon, in their own words, of course?)
> more than likely we're going to have a handful of models running on our systems at any given time
What? Who? Why? TFA is certainly in favour of running local models (although, it does seem rather fixated on LLMs - there are other jobs these things can for for us, you know; running BirdNet with greater ability to separate multiple simultaneous calls would be nice).
It doesn't help that the quote in TFA is potentially ambiguous / being misinterpreted:
> "intensified feelings of anxiety and stress for workers with higher level of neuroticism, with a potential lack of preparedness for the WFH environment exacerbating emotional instability."
That *doesn't* state "... stress for workers LEADING TO higher level of neuroticism" (which is how TFA and comments here seem to taking it) but says workers who already are a tad more neurotic than the rest (and we are *all* a bit neurotic about something) are having a worse time than the rest.
Which also sounds like stating the bleeding obvious, but is the sort of thing (mild variation in personality leading to greater negative responses) that gets glossed over.
> So it took two business schools working together to find this out?
It is quite a step forward for a business school, let alone two! After all, how many MBAs does it take to change a light bulb?[1]
[1] I don't know, that wasn't covered in the course; I'll have to call in a consultant.
Tell me know, I want to know, uh ha.
This article:
> Just last month, research indicated that HR folk are worried that return to office mandates are leading to higher staff attrition rates
>> a quarter of executives and a fifth of HR professionals hoped RTO mandates would result in staff leaving
> I don't mind sprints ... our local user group holds a couple every year, also called "hackathons"
Doing a single hackathon can be fun - like any event where you push yourself to get it done, the old neurochemicals flow and you get a rush.
Then you go home at the end of the conference and relax.
Unfortunately, you've fallen into the same trap that some Agilistas do (and which is encouraged by the very use of a word like "sprint") and confused the "hackathon" ethic with the "we are going to do the same thing next week, the week after, the week after..." of a work project.
> set expectations for such focussed sessions
Like, if you plan for every "sprint" to be that focussed[1] then you're going to burn out, or, more optimistically[2] everyone will get sick and tired of the word "sprint" and just mutter dispiritedly evey time it is mentioned.
FWIW, Good(ish) Agile also says "go home at 17:30 and forget about work" to avoid this, but...
[1] yah see, "sprints" are supposed to be focussed on which *bit* of the task is to be done; if a distraction comes up ("this lib is broken") don't fix it now, log it on the kamban, stay on task and, because we have a review within a week, that issue won't be forgotten. But "focussed wrt domain" gets muddled with the usage you just gave, where the *person* is focussed on the hack, to the exclusion of all else (hence the need to plan rest breaks, even loo stops!)
[2] from the pov of the devs: dispirited is better than burnt out; curiously enough, in the devs eyes, we aren't fungible!
Quick, write that down (oh, you have - good start); now, invent a few terms (better yet, re-use some common words) for each stage, train up some consultants and - PROFIT!
Or just get on with delivering working systems to happy customers, if that is the sort of thing that floats your boat, weirdo.
> Thankfully we have an old, non-bricked driver; just tell the machine to uninstall the "current" driver, then install the old one
Nope, you've got the FTDI driver version just *after* the bricking one!
The later driver refuses to work with the adapter, the one I'm referring to actually wrote to registers in the adapter's chip which plain stopped said chip working: the USB id was set to 0 and it wasn't recognised as a serial device by Device Manager, so even when you rolled back the driver it still didn't work.
Until you found a (non-virus-loaded) copy of a utility that would rewrite the USB id *and* rolled back the driver so it wouldn't just happen again. Which was fine and dandy after the news got around (ta, Register) but before then it was time to run in circles, panicking and bricking adapter after adapter...
> The challenge is adapting it for the customer relations team
Challenge - accepted!
The trick is to come up with novel variants of the old "id-ten-t" and "pebcak", one per customer and get 'em to quote it back to you as their customer id.
"Hi, yes, last week you guys said I was a Flash[1] customer."
I shall pass the baton on to the rest of you lot, confident that you can come up with a plentiful supply of new and useful phrases to suit the expected customer base.
[1] Flatulent, Longwinded And Shiny Headed
