* Posts by Arthur the cat

3364 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2009

Google ready to kick the cookie habit by Q3 2024, for real this time

Arthur the cat Silver badge

The alternative is advertising content based on the content of the site rather than the visitor.

How about no advertising? Works for me.

Landlord favorite Twitter sued for allegedly not paying rent on Market Square HQ

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Do everything super apps for the win!

I presume Musk lives in a house with exactly one item inside that is his TV, washing machine, bed, wardrobe, toilet, coffee maker, dishwasher, computer, frying pan, …

FOSS could be an unintended victim of EU crusade to make software more secure

Arthur the cat Silver badge
Joke

Re: E for Effort

I'm one of a very small team developing a FLOSS soft-synth.

So you've got the bit between your teeth?

Truck-size asteroid makes one of the tightest fly-bys of Earth ever recorded

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Emitting no light of their own

I suppose that should have been rather "reflecting no light" ?.

To be fair, they don't emit light of their own either.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: A box-truck-sized asteroid

ISA or PCI bus?

I²C and SPI are both much smaller. 1-wire for the really minimalist.

IPv6 for Dummies: NSA pushes security manual on DoD admins

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: "recommendation to assign IP addresses on the network via a DHCPv6"

My phone (a Pixel) generates a random MAC address for each WiFi connection by default, so SLAAC gives a different host part for every WiFi.

British monarchy goes after Twitter, alleges rent not paid for UK base

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Elon crosses another bridge

"We'll burn that bridge when we come to it" has long been a cliché.

8K? That’s cute. This display has 600 million pixels

Arthur the cat Silver badge

TV sizes

The massive display claims a resolution of 46,080 x 12,960 pixels. Put another way, that works out to just shy of 600 megapixels, or in TV marketing speak 46K.

Given that 1920 pixels wide = 2K, 46,080 pixels is 48K. No marketroid is going to miss an opportunity to claim that his is bigger than the next guy's.

Microsoft can't stop itself blowing billions on OpenAI

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Ah, the circle of software life

It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug. Fortunately at that point it attempts to do an automatic update, which breaks leaving a BSOD.

Software devs targeted as British tax authority makes fraud allegations

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Cameron and Carr

The entire taxation system is so full of loopholes

There's a company that publishes a guide to what our our tax laws actually mean each budget and IIRC it's currently a set of books running to 15,000 pages (maybe more). With a tax code that complex it's no wonder arguments about what tax is actually payable are more complex than medieval theologians' disputes about angels and pinheads. In comparison, until the PRC got heavy with Hong Kong, their tax code could be summarised in ~100 pages and was regarded as highly efficient and simple.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: HMRC : alway defining new ways

Just because something is legal, doesn't mean is allowed.

Umm, that's pretty much the definition of "legal". legal ≡ allowed, illegal ≡ not allowed.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

HMRC doesn't have "clients"

If HMRC wants to ask more questions, that's fine. We're very transparent, but accusing clients of fraud is just something else.

A client can always walk away and get someone else to do things. The HMRC has prisoners.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Arthur the cat Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Learn both?

Nobody's mentioned rods, poles or perches yet.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

Trouble is Johnson, Mogg et al are too young to have any real experience…

s/young/old Etonian/

OpenAI's ChatGPT is a morally corrupting influence

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Moral Guidance

Some time back (I think BC – Before Covid), MIT had an online trolley problem web site in the context of self driving vehicles deciding whether to kill passengers or pedestrians to see how people would answer when faced with various combinations like that. I don't know what their overall findings were, but I classified as someone who'd save the maximum number of lives regardless of who the people were. (Basically I'm a negative utilitarian.)

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Moral Guidance

I say kill them all and the problem goes away.

You are Arnaud Amalric and I claim my papal indulgence.

Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Very sensible indeed

I suspect the same applies to scientific laboratory settings where cleanliness will impact the outcome of experimentation.

In some labs the outcome of experimentation may affect the lethality of the cake.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Innumeracy

and that is the stage before 'morbidly obese'.

which is the stage before Mr Creosote.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Cake is bad, m'kay. ... quick promotion

So is the plan to bring in a "doctored" cake the day before the mandatory drug tests and offer it to people in more senior roles?

Unless the management are paying more for the proper tests, poppy seed cake would be very effective and require no doctoring. Not, of course, that I'm suggesting doing anything nefarious.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: what you get advertised is chocolate and not cauliflower

Maybe chocolate coated cauliflowers might get folks interested.

I believe you can get chocolate coated broccoli for kids.

If your DNS queries LoOk liKE tHIs, it's not a ransom note, it's a security improvement

Arthur the cat Silver badge

At the typical adoption rates there should have been 90%+ adoption by now

I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry at that. A few days ago a glitch on my firewall broke DNSSEC until I rebooted it – the only domain affected was Mythic Beasts(*), who host our DNS and mail (which was how I realised DNSSEC was broken). If I'd left the problem in place other domains might have had problems after their cached records expired, but I have no idea how far DNSSEC has actually penetrated.

(*) MB run with relatively short TTLs on their records so problems turn up faster.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

I fear you're in trouble then. Bird flu is severely affecting your quill supply chain.

Not to mention the carrier pigeons the network relies on.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: and https:// ?

The problem is that there are some root certifying authorities that not entirely trustworthy.

Also some supposedly trustworthy CAs have on occasions accidentally signed bogus certificates for domains like microsoft.com.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

So why not just bite the bullet and start using DNSSEC? Get rid of these nasty low probability hacks?

DNSSEC can only be implemented by those running the domain's servers. The 0x20 bit hack can be implemented by clients., allowing a smidgeon of extra security until the domain owners get their fingers out.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Umm... My home resolver has been doing this for years.

In case you are wondering, I haven't noticed any breakage.

Ditto. Like you I'm running unbound and I turned on the option as soon as I switched from using named.

Shot down: Google's grand fancy plan for pro-privacy targeted ads

Arthur the cat Silver badge

legal up to at least the 369th month

If it were up to me I'd go for 729th month.

Unix is dead. Long live Unix!

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: About 15 years ago...

32-bit time_t lives on in a lot of file formats.

Sure, but I suspect most of those file formats can be saved for another 68 years by presuming the fields are 32 bit unsigned and turning them into 64 bit time_t on input. Most will be file archives of one sort or another or calendars and no Unix file was ever created before 1970.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: BSD?

Linux passed Open Group testing. That means that, legally, Linux™ is a UNIX™.

None of the BSDs have. They are not, legally, Unixes.

Unix is like pornography – you know it when you see it and bureaucrats and nit-pickers trying to legislate what it is are utter numpties.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: About 15 years ago...

UNIX old-timers won't have long to wait. The 2038 time_t apocalypse is getting close.

For most of us time_t is 64 bits. [I've been using versions of Unix since 1980 so probably count as an old-timer.]

Time to study the classics: Vintage tech is the future of enterprise IT

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: "...rewriting Active Directory in FORTH under VMS..."

(Upvote for a shout out to Prolog.)(Great language.....)

[FX: Ad man voice:] If you liked Prolog, you'll love Erlang.

Arthur the cat Silver badge
Trollface

they just type the hex machine code directly in using a dos command of copy con > program .exe or the equivalent.

That means you've got an OS already. Wimp. Front panel switches into empty bare metal.

[… several passes later …]

ObXKCD.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: "...rewriting Active Directory in FORTH under VMS..."

Object-oriented languages are fine for UI, not very useful for real-programmers that use only the command-line!

Most of the windows on my screen are terminal emulators running shells + two emacs windows so I'm old school. One of the systems I've worked on(*) was a fully OO GIS. OO is very useful for modelling real world objects, which is after all where it came from (Simula being the spiritual precursor to Smalltalk). As such it's good for handling real world utility networks and assets. We had a lot of customers all over the world, many with terabytes of data (and this was in the 90s when disks were measured in gigabytes).

(*) Designed and wrote the language and system level level code for to be accurate.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: "...rewriting Active Directory in FORTH under VMS..."

Took me 30 seconds to find a pdf download.

On my bookshelves I've got three Forth books that I've had for yonks(*), plus the 1981 BYTE book on Threaded Interpretive Languages by Loeliger. I've also got copies of most of Anton Ertl's papers on TIL implementation. Don't need any more.

(*) 40+ years for at least one. I'm a high priest of vintage tech, most of which was new when I learnt it. Now get off my lawn.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: EPROM blasting from the past...

(Why didn't I keep a copy? And why did I throw away a lot of legacy kit that was "just taking up room", as the wife said at the time?)

From personal experience (and similar regret), the final clause has a lot to do with it. Especially if said in a particular tone of voice.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: "...rewriting Active Directory in FORTH under VMS..."

For those wishing to try, you may be interested in this little book on Object Oriented FORTH.

"Buy used £113.29"

Nope!

Twitter starts auction to flip the bird, furniture, pizza ovens, gadgets galore

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Elon is the new Paris in case you missed it.

Close to Seine?

Third-party Twitter apps stopped dead with no explanation from El Musko

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Vitrue

Virtue may rise with the Sun, but Vice gets a nice civilised lie-in and then approaches the day with a smile on its face.

Arthur the cat Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: The meltdown continues

As I get accused of being a left wing extremist when I quote Adam Smith, I'd have to disagree.

Speechless.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Genius is as Ge[n]ius does

Wikipedia: Panjandrum, also known as The Great Panjandrum, was a massive, rocket-propelled, explosive-laden cart designed by the British military during World War II.

Me, glossobuccalicly: what could possibly go wrong?

This can’t be a real bomb threat: You've called a modem, not a phone

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Back in the day ....

Used correctly with expert placement one could conceivably bring down a surprisingly large building with a a surprisingly small amount [of explosives]

Me, mid-70s, drinking with a friend in a pub shortly after the Birmingham pub bombings. Friend is ex-army, specifically a sapper with considerable demolition expertise. He was saying, in a relatively loud voice, something along the lines of "Bloody IRA, absolutely useless with explosives! Use the wrong ones all the time, that's why so many people survive. With the right explosives I could kill everyone in this pub, using far less than the Irish gits do!". I looked round and everyone near us was staring, backing away slowly.

Virgin Orbit doesn't

Arthur the cat Silver badge
Happy

Re: A30\A303

See my comment above.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: A30\A303

Going down the A30 in summer can sometimes take longer than a flight to Orlando.

It's probably better to take the M4 across the Severn crossing, though, rather than waiting for the Aust ferry.

However to get from Wales to Cornwall, it might be better to use the M4 then M5 or A38.

Bravo, chaps! A thoroughly British thread. None of that new-fangled satnav nonsense here, just manly chat about driving routes like God intended. I only wish there was a Union Jack icon.

Disruptive innovation's like a party. It's always happening elsewhere

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: "And the concept of FOSS is actively hostile to parents"

And it's been fixed.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: The Least Publishable Unit Strikes Again

so each individual paper/patent is almost insignificant, but in aggregate, something more interesting emerges.

The problem with that is that you have to find and read all the papers, which will be largely repetitive padding, in order to get the interesting idea. This both wastes time and delays understanding and generally hurts research.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

"And the concept of FOSS is actively hostile to parents"

FOSS as a stroppy teenager.

[Typo also emailed to the on-duty editor.]

Texts from your dog and brain-free astronomy: The best of the rest from CES

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Colour changing cars

But think of the advantages for old fashioned bank robbers(*) – what colour was the getaway car? Green, officer. Blue car passes by, occupants chortling.

(*) Are there any left, or have they all been replaced by online scammers?

OpenAI is developing software to detect text generated by ChatGPT

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Nice way to make profits

Sell traps to the poachers and sell trap detectors to the gamekeepers.

CES Worst in Show slams gummi gouging, money-wasting mugs, and other dubious kit

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Bugger! Copy & paste error. Try this

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Just how cretinous do you have to be?

To which Mother Nature replies: just how cretinous do you want?

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Good to know the one in this photo only cost £180 then.