Posts by jlturriff

Leading AI models (even Grok) are all a bunch of leftist punks

It would be interesting to see how the Chinese LLMs compare.

Java was a three-day hotfix away from dying horribly on stage

Re: Hyper competitive?

Of course! MacroShaft's idea of competition has always been Embrace - Extend - Destroy, thus competing its rivals to death.

The Document Foundation says Microsoft's file formats keep users on a short leash

Certainly. This is not an issue of individual choice, but of organizations' choice. The organizations need to mandate use of a truly open format.

The biggest problem is migrating documents encoded in the myriad conflicting versions of proprietary formats to a stable open format.

AWS customer learns the hard way how even the smallest oversight can be mission-critical

Re: spam spam spam spam

I don't understand why anyone would neglect to set up filters to route messages from known entities into (at least one) custom mail folder(s) so that they can't be lost in the spam folder?

Perhaps I'm strange/obsessive in that I currently have 53 active filters in my mail agent, and I have disabled the spam folder; this makes it easy to spot important mail that has escaped my filters or needs a new filter. Only mail that I have reviewed myself and determined is spam gets moved (manually) into the spam folder.

And I'm not an administrator of any system outside of my home LAN (though before retirement I was an administrator of IBM mainframe systems).

Billing software error sends billion-dollar AWS estimates

Re: Hmm...

I think you meant, "...settling invoices and ruining the company..." :-)

How the AI bubble could pop and take down the global economy, according to the BIS

Re: but how to shore up to protect yourself?

The current situation seems to me a lose-lose situation. Keep your retirement money in your 401K and have it evaporate when the bubble bursts; move it into a regular bank account and have the tax man confiscate a large portion of it (and then have the residue evaporate when the bubble bursts); buy gold and have the tax man confiscate most of it...

No way to win that I can see.

The last few bubbles mostly damaged the economies of individual companies, but I'm guessing that this one will crash the global economy. The countries least affected will likely be in the third-world, but even they will not emerge unscathed.

We need a way to force governments to just let these 'too-big-to-fail' companies FAIL, not push the damage onto people who have been forced into the financial gambling system.

Microsoft rivals line up to tell UK watchdog where the software behemoth hurt them

If the EU can pry enforcement away from Ireland...

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

Let me guess (I don't use office tools much, or Windows products at all); Office doesn't let one turn off spell checking for individual columns?

Firefox 152 understands 'Sssh!'

So Chrome is blocking ad-blockers? What a surprise! Just run privoxy outside your browser.

MX Linux 25.2 provides possible refuge from AI as well as systemd

Re: taskbar on the left!

and if you install TDE (Trinity Desktop Environment) you can not only put it on any side: bottom, top, left or right, but you can also add additional ones on any of the other sides. Here's one of my desktop screens:

https://c.mail.com/@649596501445582267/XCwTXeK9RptaUuqwZMIhGQ

Leslie

SpacemiT shows off usably quick RISC-V mini desktop

Re: We reckon it merits some better graphic design that somehow emphasizes this.

Perhaps a right-pointing arrow over the Space and a left-pointing arrow under the emiT?

---->

SpacemiT

<---

Kyndryl takes employees' pulse while cutting off circulation for some

Re: Spreadsheet migration

Now, why would anyone think that it might be a good idea to run some tests with the new software suite before ripping out the old one?

Bedrock and a hard place: Claude adventure leaves AWS user staring down $30K invoice

Re: The world of AI is demoralising

"But what's the point in coding it yourself?"

The point is continually improving your coding skills.

You may say that the way non-coders are responding to the AI phenomenon makes that worthless, but after the AI bubble pops you'll be in a better position than those who let their skills atrophy by letting the AIs do their work for them.

60% of MD5 password hashes are crackable in under an hour

Re: OT: Stupid narrow layout... (and On Topic: Newsworthy?=

If sites insist on jumping onto these sorts of bandwagons, they need to add a switch in the users' account profiles so that we can decline to participate!

Speaking of sites that don't accept modern controls like pass-phrases, at least one site that I use still requires their limited-length passwords to be only alphanumeric; no special characters.

Locked, stocked, and losing budget: AI vendor lock-in bites back

The crash is now on the horizon?

Looks like the burst of the AI-bubble is on its way...

Microsoft to stop taking reservations for 17 Azure VM flavours, kill 13 in 2028

Re: Once again, Redmond is doing a Redmond

Of course, if you outsource your data and processing to systems owned and controlled by a third party, you ought to contract with them in such a way that you aren't surprised when they pull the rug from under you.

It's very much like giving all of your recipes to another country and firing all of your chefs, then being surprised when said country eats your lunch.

Not to mention...

"Microsoft will certainly like the move because newer CPUs offer more cores and almost certainly consume less energy than Intel’s oldies, meaning Redmond can pack more VMs into fewer servers while incurring lower operating costs."

And of course, it's useful as a way to jack up the price of their Asure services.

Microsoft's bad obsession is showing up in shabby services and slipshod software. Here's proof

Re: You have no (almost) excuse to still be on Github

Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, Github was intended, like the software it's designed to support, to be an open-source repository system, originally for maintenance of Linux, not a corporate-owned system. Whether or not a user chooses to run it as a local repository or one hosted in the cloud is not relevant to what MacroShaft has done to it.

Sure; but some of the remainder, and those gullible enough to hire on after that, managed to develop enough understanding to keep MacroSlop limping along until now.

It's sort of what happened with the run-up to WWI and the appearance of the "Spanish Flu," which after a century was recapitulated by the financial disasters of the last decade and the appearance of COVID; just as the world didn't learn how to handle financial fraud and the principles of social health management, MacroSlop hasn't learned by its experience with the internet's rise how to avoid shitting itself and its customers/victims.

Re: What actually IS an AI?

At base it's just a horrifically expensive random number generator.

UK drivers' agency shrugs off claims of week-long booking site smashes, blames browser configs

Re: Ah, a shit captcha

It's accelerating your login rejection.

PowerPoint punishment sent users into an infinite loop after lunch

Re: Back 20 years ago….

This stuff went on even back thirty or more years, before the days of PCs. IBM's VM operating system*'s hypervisor, CP, has a command to set the terminal's line size to a value other than the hardware physical length (80 chars). It was fun to enter CP TERMINAL LINESIZE <n> (where <n> was something like 5, or better 1) which would cause responses from the computer to wrap after that number of characters. Most people didn't know about that obscure command, so they usually had to log off to recover.

*The best OS. :-)

AI reality check: Here's what three companies learned building wallets, homes, and games

Auditing every interaction

"With a single agent interface, Citi can standardize and audit every interaction, a governance tool that Citi has not previously had in its kit. He contrasted that model with existing human to human workflows. 'Every conversation that we have today is not auditable and recorded, and can vary from advisor to advisor,' Sieg said."

And now, will they recruit another AI agent to review the first one's audit logs, or hire a new army of people to do it? If another AI, how will they know it's not hallucinating? Sounds to me like it's 'turtles all the way down.'

Workers should control the means of agentic production, suggests WorkBeaver boss

Windows and Mac only; not much use to us, eh?

Stealthy browser extensions waited years before infecting 4.3M Chrome, Edge users with backdoors and spyware

Re: Most likely hacked or bought up

So you can say definitively that this case doesn't involve a nation-state?

Unofficial IETF draft calls for grant of five nonillion IPv6 addresses to ham radio operators

Just like happened with IPv4 (way too late).

Zoomers are officially worse at passwords than 80-year-olds

I suppose that the persistence of use of these ridiculously hackable passwords is responsible for the rise of the mandate of mfa. I HATE being required to have my phone to hand whenever I want to log into e.g. my online banking website, which I consider to be unnecessary, because the password for their site (though artificially weakened by their length and content rules) is along the lines of "eNyRuÈ9ÚâvH·³Ð§%b4f%õÜWÈ", which is what my password manager's generator produces. (This example is one I generated solely for demonstration here, and is not and never will be used on any website.) Even before password managers became available, I generated my own, shorter and with fewer character choices, passwords with a Linux-based tool called pwgen. The ignorance of people with regards to passwords seems to me unbelievable.

Re: Printer Setup? Password?

Well, yeah...what thinking person considers storing passwords on an unsecure device like a "smart" phone, let alone using it for touchy things like banking?

As for printers, in the Linux world at least, where Apple's CUPS or HP's hplip tools (both proprietary, ironically) are used, in recent years printer setup has become more difficult. My (admittedly old) Brother colour laser printer has stopped talking to my computer since the last several upgrades; I can access its web interface, but it never sees files that are sent to it (which is now a common complaint).

...and these days that's a Primitive technique, what with speculative prefetching, etc. (which I don't understand at all).

Starlink’s method of dodging solar storms may make it slower, for longer

This is another reason that the FCC's intention to allow low-earth satellite networks to participate in the US's new broadband expansion is wrong-headed (the others being, compared to land-based fibre-optic, lower speed and higher maintenance cost).

You'll never guess what the most common passwords are. Oh, wait, yes you will

There don't appear to be too many of these sites, but I have run across several that restrict password length, and the number/variety of allowed special characters as well, forcing their users to provide relatively weak passwords. Even a sixteen-character password restricted to seven-bit ASCII is, IMO, way too weak.

I also wonder what those who store their password wallets in the cloud are thinking of?

52-year-old data tape could contain only known copy of UNIX V4

I find the illustration of IBM mainframe peripherals used for this article amusing.

Re: Damn AI!!!

Switch to a different password manager, of course.

Google Cloud suspended customer's account three times, for three different reasons

Re: Happened with my son's account

I'm happy with my mail.com (not Gmail.com) account, which I find very reliable, though I do use POP and download everything, filtering it on my local machine.

(I have to admit that their web interface sucks, bu then, all mail service web interfaces suck, IMO.)

AI: The ultimate slacker's dream come true

Not just line workers, either.

"The ethics of shirking are a debate in themselves. What of the ship that runs aground because of faked soundings? The dishonesty of taking a salary for a job not done? Against that, what of unreasonable rigidity in place of proper management, or concentrating the rewards of working in one place and the miseries of boredom and insecurity in another? Work avoidance is certainly a form of hypocrisy, but it exists in dynamic equilibrium in the whole framework of hypocrisy that underpins so much of working life."

You must realize also that goofing off isn't an activity reserved solely to those whose productivity is relied on to keep the company afloat; there are plenty of people in the management tier who waste their and others' time the same way.

Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead? No, wait – it's on Windows

I don't think I've seen a product whose "documentation" more inspired me to run away screaming.

To digital natives, Microsoft's IT stack makes Google's look like a model of sanity

Certainly, KDEs 4, 5 and 6 are bloatware (the most popular Linux display managers are), but KDE3 is still around, as is its fork TDE <https://www.trinitydesktop.org/>.

VMware bungles cloud management portal upgrade, twice in two weeks

"The migration plan is consistent with Broadcom’s past decisions to replace VMware’s support sites with services that mirror the look and feel, and presumably backend, of the portals it operates for users of its other products."

So they're trying to clone an existing, working system with another that looks and acts identically? What's the advantage, versus just modifying the original, which they already own?

Greg Kroah-Hartman explains the Cyber Resilience Act for open source developers

Re: Theory vs real world

And whoever came up with the PipeWire abomination.

Re: Compliance is the same overhead for all producers :(

But the tools used to compile your source and integrate its output to the libraries it uses (or related tools) can generate the list of components, and their versions, used; so just a little scripting can generate your SBOM almost automagically.

Make Windows 11 more useful and less annoying with these 11 Registry hacks

Re: Super helpful...

And, conveniently, if you accidentally corrupt the thing it affects every part of the system, not just the app you were attempting to reconfigure.

Microsoft digs up Vista-era animated wallpaper for Windows 11. Here's how to get it

Re: Class Action needed

Well, theoretically it allows the end user to do something useful.

(I really wish that IBM would allow me to run an image of VM/XA or VM/ESA (now obsolete compared to z/VM) in a virtual machine, but the only "freeware" version is one that doesn't have Xedit or CMS Pipelines, so is crippled. I was 200% more productive on the IBM Zseries OSes than I have been since retiring and moving to toy computers.)

Want a text editor that can be truely automated, as opposed to having keystroke record/playback "macros"? Xedit. In fact, Xedit can be used to write whole full-screen applications, not just edit text, and its macro language, Rexx is so much more programmer-friendly than emacs' Lisp.

Want a pipeline processor that can split and merge record flows, allowing one to modify different flows different ways, then merge them for output? CMS Pipelines. (Okay, NetRexx provides an NRX Pipelines clone, but it doesn't implement many of the CMS Pipelines features.)

I (daily) miss my mainframe productivity tools...

Re: Confused...

Oh, yes; I run all of my apps' windows full-screen on my ultrawide monitor.

Really, I wonder why anyone would do that (except for a few occasions where it is warranted for a moment).

Logitech's MX Master 4 mouse buzzes with haptic feedback but lacks lefty love

Re: Trackball

Well, reflecting the physical layout of the device is trivial, but redesigning the circuit board that it encloses is not so much (but not so difficult as to justify not providing such support).

Lucky for you that you're not as profoundly left-handed as I am. For me, coordination in my right hand is such that its use with mouse or numeric keypad on the keyboard is too jerky to be useful, so I'm stuck with an ambidextrous mouse and a keyboard with a lot of useless keys. One would think that a company like Logitech would be big enough to be able to afford to cater to the left-handed 20% of the population that it serves, but no, we aren't as important as to merit their notice in the face of profit-making.

I notice, when searching their website, that the search string "left-handed mouse" returns many instances of "ambidextrous mice." Oh, thank you, Logitech, that's just what I'm looking for. Of the rest, the prices are astronomical, most being designated "gaming mouse", which is irrelevant to me. Again, thank you, Logitech (though of course, other vendors' offerings are much the same).

Trump’s tariff‑shaped stick can’t beat reality on US chip fabbing

14A = 14Å, 18A = 18Å?

So if the government is subsidizing Intel, if Intel doesn't meet the 1:1 target, the government will have to pay (part of) its own tariff?

AI Darwin Awards launch to celebrate spectacularly bad deployments

Well, Mr Drumpf prefers to rely on his own proven stable genius rather than artificial stupidity when deciding what improvements are appropriate for america.

LibreOffice 25.8: Faster, leaner, and finally speaks PDF 2.0

A shortcoming of all of the Office packages

What I don't understand about LibreOffice, OpenOffice, MS Office, etc. is their abysmal support for importing and parsing HTML/CSS?