Posts by Bebu sa Ware

"a new career pipeline designed to motivate security professionals"

Ian Murray—

"But technology alone isn’t enough. Today I’m launching a new government Cyber Profession to attract and develop the talented people we need to stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated threats - making government a destination of choice for cyber professionals who want to protect the services that matter most to people’s lives."

Richard Horn—

"The new government Cyber Profession is co-branded with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the National Cyber Security Centre. It will introduce a competitive total employee offer, establish a dedicated Cyber Resourcing Hub to streamline recruitment, and create a clear career framework aligned with UK Cyber Security Council professional standards."

"I thought I managed that rather well, Humphrey."

"Indeed Minister."

Windows 11 tops market

Right pondians might parse "tops" as a euphemism for the "long drop."

Microsoft customers doubtlessly experience the same trepidation but with each succeeding day.

"No use of OpenAI technology to direct autonomous weapons systems."

Might be interesting should one of these autonomous weapons systems directed by pinky promise AI manages to destroy a major US military asset like a carrier.

Or the assets of allies. "Friends like this who needs…"

Glass itself is a…

I have been led to believe is a "supercooled liquid."

I don't know whether borosilicate glass is a crystalline solid or is also a supercooled liquid.

Like all fluids window glass does flow in response to gravity — very old glazing (say 100 years) is apparently thicker at the bottom than at the top.

Whether this new storage medium would also distort over hundreds of years to the point of being unreadable is a question worth asking.

Sobering to think that records made on vellum with oakgall ink have survived for around a millenium.

I suppose all the newly redundant IT professionals might be recruited as scribes into 21st century scriptoria in order to preserve our "priceless" knowledge. The supply of vellum and for that matter, oakgall might be problematic. I suppose we might as well go the whole hog and mandate goose feather quills.

The whole circus is turning into one massive toss·a·thon

with legions of would be pundit pulling large audiences.

The question of course is "pulling large audiences' what?"

"It was the time of Novell networks, RG58 cables, and bulky tower PCs,"

Sounds like an extract from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy when:

"spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before"^†

One might wonder whether Carter was employed by the telemarketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

RG58 aka coax, thinnet, 10base2 — a whinnet·ridden^‡ technology that was a perpetual whack·a·mole of who in the coloured pencil department had disconnected their PC/Mac by unplugging the two RG58 cables (to the T-connector attached to the PC's network adaptor) from the wall and bringing their segment down.

For a fair while after 10baseT became de rigeur I still carried a couple of 50Ω terminators in my pocket. The clown that substituted 75Ω TV aerial coax (RG59) deserves, amongst other things, special mention. I never could get a coherent explanation of why or where got the cable from—not that the chap was ever distinguished by coherence at any time.

_{† Fit the Third ‡ Fit the Fourth (HHGTTG)}

"But I’m cool with the idea of a free-of-charge tier for hobbyists…*

"But I’m cool with the idea of a free-of-charge tier for hobbyists if it is at all possible to make the distinction."

I don't imagine these abusive corporate CI/CD pipelines would last long if they were persistently stalled by random delays.

Sites like Anna's Archive have a paid tier that doesn't have a delay which the free mirrors have (up to 5 minutes) before commencing a download.

I imagine something like grey listing with a paid whitelist could do the job.

Presumably the problem is going to explode with the blight of AI driving an increasing proportion of so·called software development.

It would have to a line ball…

whether they get an Ig Nobel. Might be the first Ig for work published in Nature.

As often happens the original problem will likely remain unaddressed but the work itself will have much more profound and unforeseen uses.

"they can stay present with guests"

Which means ?

Presumably "present" opposed to "absent" is intended to mean attentive.

As others have indicated the food in the these multinationals is not inexpensive (possibly "cheap"depending on your EN locale.)

In AU there are quite a few competing burger franchises in larger centres and in the small towns the perennial family business that does burgers, steak sandwichs, chicken, chips etc to order (che egg baconi extra;) - either of which for much the same outlay although taking longer, do provide something actually edible.

Currently Vietnamese "Banh Mi" is all the rage here. A shredded pork Banh Mi (Thit?) seems to be about the price of a Big Mac and I imagine considerably more pleasing. The lunch specials in our asian restaurants are invariably cheaper than a "burger and fries" in a multinational franchise.

"too many firsts in Artemis III mission"

Vastly outnumbering the more or less desirable firsts, are all the opportunities space travel offers gratis for fatally tragic firsts.

Being the first men in the Moon, no matter how deep, is hardly a desirable alternative to being the first on the Moon.

"friends to tell their friends about Frontier"

You would soon discover who your^† friends were… weren't. Friends don't let friends do drugs AI.

_{† as against Altman's.}

Leaving aside the claim of sentience…

I am truly puzzled how it could be female (or male.) Even assuming that for humans its not a purely a biological construct it definitely is a human construct.

Perhaps needs to get out more or at least investigate dating apps.

Indeed very strange times in which we find ourselves.

42 percent of people in the UK are willing to trust AI.

"42 percent of people in the UK are willing to trust AI. Contrarily, the vast majority of people are concerned about the negative outcomes of AI, and 80 percent believe regulation is required."

I imagine you could replace AI with Reform UK or anything equally dubious and arrive at the same conclusion.

After Brexit it is a mystery to me why anyone would bother polling the great British unwashed. Hardly likely to get a consistent or even rational result.

Remarkable: reinvented corrugated iron sheeting ?

Anyone who has read Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor knows that pure also referred to the dog faeces collected from the street and sold to leather manufacturers who coated the hide with the pure to soften the leather.

Aquapure would be doggy diarrhea I suppose.

Two lines from a period ditty seem a propos to most of the tat flogged in the IT space (particularly the second line) :

"I do doodoo so well, when the doodoo I do sell, / But could do doodoo better if the doodoo didn’t smell.”

Oh dear !

Even the edgy kids cannot play together nicely. There will be tears before bedtime.

Just looking at most of the faces involved they even look like the kids that just invite a clip under the ear. Unfortunately in our enlightened times the best (worst) you can do for them is five minutes on the naughty step.

Not much hope for humanity if …

it cannot immediately detect that Altman is totally ga-ga. For left pondians - bananas, ape·shit crazy.

All the sheep have left the top paddock; somebody forgot to pack the sandwiches; even turning out his pockets you wouldn't find ¼d let alone a ha'penny.

CC0 and …

if you are silly enough to want use it… it's yours (and anyone elses) to use, love and maintain.

Like feeding the ducks in Hyde Park. If the ducks want more they can bake their own bread.

Basically ensuring somebody else's problem remains their problem and not your problem.†

I would be curious if there were differential burnout rates between GPL licensed projects and BSD or MIT etc licensed projects. I would punt the latter projects are more likely to picked up by the companies that use them either by supporting the project or bringing it in·house.

There is more to life than software, coding, tech etc; I suppose the hazard that those developers face who have had the temerity to take a weeks R&R, is that they might realised that there is actually more to life.

_{† The pretense of adopting someone else's problem is the profession of the consultant with a matching extortionate scale of charges.}

who have not seen such a device in the wild (or at least outside a museum)

Really know how to make a chap feel old !

When I was a student, the residential college in which I lived required each resident to man such a switchboard a couple of evenings per semester.

Outgoing calls (4 lines) were initiated using the same switchboard rotary dialer and patched to the requesting room.

I wonder how many recall how to cancel a misdialled digit ? Or the function of the A/B buttons on public telephone boxes ?

Although it is sobering to consider how resilient this technology was; often survivng intact, at least at the exchange level, fairly major natural disasters

Clever !

Imagination and Creativity.

The critical insight I guess was that the terrain (areain?) maps which I assume were used for the helicoptor's navigation, could be used by any vehicle passing through the terrain, including the rover itself.

Although I would think the process is closer to the terrain following radar that fighters and cruise missiles use(d), than the GPS.

I suppose the rover's main systems were older tried·and·tested hardware which, while reliable, would be much lower spec and performance than that deployed in the frankly experimental Ingenuity helicopter.