Posts by ParlezVousFranglais

Dev proves LLMs will run on anything – even a $10 microcontroller

Re: "There is another model, called Barista [for] topics pertaining to espresso. "

I feel a subsequent run on polo mallets and 14-pound lump hammers coming on...

Torvalds challenged the haters to fork Linux. Someone said 'hold my beer'

...we do approve of exploring and learning and having fun...

The only proper way to do IT...

Capita hears demand for pension scheme cleanup 'loud and clear' – but won't say yes

Re: Two options for Crapita

Completely with you - for too long, successive governments of all persuasions have dithered over upsetting large corporations. Time to draw a line in the sand - if it takes a ban for bidding on Public Sector contracts for 3 years, then so be it, and if that looks like being challenged in the courts, then put an explicit bill through parliament and be done with it.

This far, no further...

Court tosses Microsoft's appeal in pre-owned software licenses spat

Or to finish the day depending on which side of the pond you are sitting?

Have a nice day!...

Boffins bet on quantum computers, AI supers to solve fusion fuel dilemma

I assume somebody somewhere does.

*Everybody* assumes somebody somewhere does - that's the problem, and why they need AI to "fix" it...

Government's cyber pledge lands 60 signatories, including M&S and, somehow, Capita

Sounds like a classic lose-lose initiative to me - sign up, and when you get hacked it proves that the initiative is pointless, or don't sign up and when you get hacked it's because you clearly don't take security seriously enough.

Rather than pointless virtue-signalling, what we really need is genuine sanctions similar to the world of HSE, where a failure to do everything possible to secure a company's systems will see Directors held personally liable, and corporate fines that are large enough to make investing in cyber-security up-front the preferable option

NASA unsure Boeing Starliner will ever be certified for human flight

I get the problems are not ideal, but I thought the whole reason that both Boeing and SpaceX were being funded was to ensure that commercially they kept each sweet, and to ensure that if one solution ever got grounded, the other could continue to fly

Seems to me that by pulling the plug on the only serious current competitor to SpaceX that now just ties the US space program to a single vendor. That will not just increase costs anyway in the medium-long term due to a lack of competition, but also leave the administration in a very difficult position should the Falcon's get grounded for any reason, especially if needed in an emergency.

UK government wants 'trusted' news sources promoted above the social media noise

better teaching people how to think, instead of what to think.....

That also extends not just to large media organisations but also to governments and educational establishments.

They have now spent several decades trying to encourage dependance rather than encouraging critical thinking and "contrary" views - Governments because they incorrectly thought that populations would be easier to control that way, Education because they can earn more money by simply telling students to sit down, shut up and watch the in-flight movie, and Media because it tries to profit from the prevailing zeitgeist and goes with majority opinions rather than old-fashioned genuine investigative journalism (which rarely earns any money).

The problem we now see is that those (successful it has to be said) campaigns have left large numbers of people with little or no capacity to analyse primary information sources (or even to understand what a primary source actually is), which makes people far more susceptible to both disinformation & "nudging"

What we see here then is simply the obvious next step inn the playbook of trying to artificially promote the "right" narrative, and what counts as the "right" narrative will of course very soon be decided by the forerunner of the Ministry of Truth

Everything's bigger and better in Texas – even data breaches

Re: Unnecessary data collection

Just to try to stop those damned Mexicanians from retaking the Alamo...

Re: So, they got..

Yeah seems like someone got hooked then the attackers just reeled in it, probably straight off the net. I'm sure it's made a rod for the poor IT team's back...

Waymo hits the brakes after robotaxis keep missing the signs for freeway construction zones

Hmmm…. If only there was a way to install some kind of completely autonomous (perhaps even semi-intelligent) entity somewhere towards the front of the vehicle that could demonstrate:

Nuanced Hazard Perception

Superior Contextual Reasoning

High Adaptability

Real-time Intuition

Non-Verbal Communication

Intent Comprehension

Flexible Edge-Case Handling

Reliable Low-Light Navigation

Minimal Chance of Sensor Blindness

Unmapped Road Competency

Infrequent System Failures

Zero Cybersecurity Risks

Nah, maybe not…. it would never catch on…

Britain's privacy watchdog quits after 'poor judgment' admission

Re: Opportunity

Given that he was the guy who decided not to investigate after the Army put thousands of Afghan lives at risk by emailing their details to the whole world, I'm sure there's a desk sat ready for him at the MOD

France and Germany agree to disagree, ditch joint next-gen Euro fighter

Nothing solves global armageddon like a good cuppa...

Logitech knows when to fold 'em

Yep:... "When you want to insert a nail into a piece of wood, don't do anything fancy or glamorous. Just take the damn hammer and hit the son of a bitch until it's in"

GOV.UK goes Dutch on payments as it dumps Stripe

Re: Stripe is USAian

I might have missed it, but how does the UK switching from a US provider to a Dutch one improve UK digital sovereignty?

UK lawmakers call on government to ditch Palantir NHS contract

Re: Exactly 60 minutes

Just remember - access to the site is free, so YOU are the product and your interactions with the site are what makes money for it's staff, it's contributors and it's owners

This is just as true of El Reg as it is for all the tech companies we love to hate, although unfortunately borne out by the fact that despite many comments from many people on many articles since the redesign, there seems to have been nothing front and centre as an explanation regarding the changes.

However, whatever the reasons for the change, and whatever the reasons for the apparent lack of subsequent engagement with the general readership, one thing the changes have nothing to do with is being "woke"

The latest innovation in UK public transport: Schrödinger's trains

Adams not Schrödinger

The obvious solution of course is to fall back on Douglas Adams' principle of Zen navigation - just pick a commuter who looks like they know where they are going and follow them - you won't end up where you wanted to get to, but you'll be surprised when you find yourself somewhere you really needed to be...

Lego throws its own Hail Mary

Didn't realise the smaller Artemis kit was that cheap tbh - I suspect the cost differential purely equals the IP Licensing differential. Wait to see when Henry Cavill launches the 40K franchise on Amazon if Lego takes a license for that - then you'll REALLY see some pain...

In the grim darkness of the far future there are only royalty fees...

Govern your bots carefully or chaos could ensue

...after all, bots don't make themselves

Yet....

UK govt dept sent a document 'in error.' Now it's being used in a £370M contract lawsuit

I've said it before and I'll say it again - except in matters of national security, all public sector contracts should be PUBLIC - it's my money, I should know exactly how it's being spent and be able to pick over the details of the contract.

All this rubbish about needing to protect commercially sensitive details is designed to favour corporate shareholders - we need to rebalance the scales, holding both the commercial bidders and the civil servants making the decisions fully to account to the taxpayers funding their jollies...

Waymo's self-driving cars face their toughest test yet: London

...if a rider uses any bike (electric or manual) in the course of trade...

Probably the single most sensible suggestion of any of the comments on here, and would go a HUGE way to increasing safety on our roads - 100% also ban learners on mopeds/motorbikes from carrying out any trade activities until they are fully qualified

Re: Video recording needed

That bloody elf has a lot to answer for...

Britain gives Rolls-Royce the nod to sketch out its mini reactor future

Re: No info on the technology?

Careful about reminding people it's there - some bright spark will come along and think it's a great spot for a district ground-source heating scheme...

Re: No info on the technology?

Come on, be optimistic... A viable fusion reactor is obviously now only 20-30 years away, and having been so for about the last 70 years the law of averages says that SURELY it must show up at some point before the turn of the next millenium, probably just a few years after a working Quantum computer...

UK state bank considers lengthening disastrous IT program

Re: Same old….

Yep - and same old story - rather than the NAO and PAC "experts" getting involved at the start and demonstrating their "competence" at project management and auditing, they only get involved after years of mismanagement and vast quantities of wasted tax payer cash, and only then to pop up and state the bleeding obvious

Amazon would rather shareholders did not look too closely at carbon footprint

Honestly, if I'm investing in a company (and I don't in Amazon), I'm doing it for one reason, and that's because I want it to make oodles of money for me.

If a failure to pander to namby-pamby wishy-washy tree-hugging ideology suddenly starts to directly impact profits, then for sure, the board needs to demonstrate it's "eco credentials" - but when people are buying on Amazon, or corporates are increasing their AWS spend, very few of them genuinely give a flying **** about how "green" the underlying system is, and those who do probably aren't going anywhere near Amazon in the first place anyway.

So if the Amazon board choose not to arbitrarily tie themselves in red tape and the eco-investors want to throw their toys out of the pram and take their investment elsewhere, that's fine by me, and I'm pretty sure that it's also fine by the vast majority of non-eco-activist Amazon investors

Artemis II astronaut: 'I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working'

So NASA can still talk to Voyager 1 & 2 at over 13 billion miles away and nearly 50 years after launch, but get Microsoft involved and you lose your comms in less than a day

I just have no words...

'People's Panel' to check if UK wants controversial Digital ID will cost £630K

with the output "weighed alongside the broader consultation feedback"

A euphemism for a box ticking exercise - we already know it's coming anyway regardless of who says what, and we already know that Crapita will eventually deliver a half-baked solution way over budget and six years late, in such a way that forces every other government system to have to undertake a complete redesign in order to be able to use it

They will of course call it a success....

Google is to journalism what Vikings were to monks. Now their man will run the BBC

Re: research indicates that 63% of people polled think the TV licence is poor value for money

In the 2024 election, Labour won with only 34% of the vote, so I think you'll find we DO demonstrate the same degree of discrimination... just sayin...

NASA's lunar reboot is long on ambition, short on answers

Re: Exactly how will astronauts get to and from that moonbase?

Until the egos of Musk and Bezos collide in a catastrophic explosion that sends the moon hurtling off into space?

Samsung folds the Galaxy Z TriFold after just a few months

Other types of display Samsung could now try:

Slide-out additional screen - to launch one they'd need to come out of their shell...

Transparent screen - users will probably see right through that...

Roll-up screen - they might decide to just wrap that up...

Digital fruit fly brain model walks and cleans its feelers

tipped the ones we didn't need into vinegar.

I've eaten in a couple of pubs where your vinegar obviously ended up...

UK mobilizes lawyers to keep report on Gatwick 'drone' chaos under wraps

Indeed - about 60 "warships", but about 350+ officers at Captain rank and above - also worth noting that the C/O of HMS Dragon (when it eventually gets going) has a rank of Commander (below Captain)

So 350+ penpushers and seemingly very little clue about what the Navy is there to do - either that or no backbone to stand up to successive governments of both persuasions - either way they should collectively hang their heads in absolute shame...

Given that the MoD has just demonstrated it has no serviceable warships, submarines or even a remotely workable plan to respond to events that the whole of the rest of the world knew weeks ago were just about to happen, I'm not sure that the release of a few pages of processes detailing how inept the security services are at finding an errant drone represents any kind of significant threat to national security.

Please just release the docs, accept the ministerial resignation, do the obligatory u-turn, and get on with life...

MoJ puts Prisoner Telephony Service replacement on hold yet again

Re: Plus VAT??

Ah - so that's why government departments spend so long chasing their own tails?...

CERN sends AI-trained robot mice scurrying through LHC beam pipes

This is one of those times where I marvel at how certain aspects of technology have progressed so little, and at how much hype gets attached to things that by now should be pretty meh...

I remember going to a computer show at Olympia in 1981 very well as it was my very first encounter with a live ZX81 - it literally kickstarted a lifelong passion of computers - by the Sinclair stand there was a huge maze, a few meters square, where university teams were competing to see who's "mouse" could autonomously find its way out of the maze most quickly, a test of both the construction and use of sensors on the mouse, and coding on the attached computers that the mice were attached to by ribbon cables.

So sure, we have miniaturisation of the sensors and you can now get that level of computing into something smaller than a pinhead, but is this really something for one of the world's most advanced tech projects to be shouting about 45 years later?... Maybe I'm just an old cynic having a bad day!...

UK still doodling digital pound while Brussels frets over payment sovereignty

Any digital currency issued by a central bank will be all about control: there will be tracking designed in, so that central government can see where and how people are spending their money, and at some point there will be limits put on spending your money in the way that you wish to - for example benefits payments only being able to be spent on what the government defines as necessities, social and behavioural controls, expiration dates on money to force economic stimulus etc etc

While none of this will be implemented immediately, once you've opened Pandora's box, there's no going back...

European Space Agency and China both achieve gigabit links to geostationary satellites

Tin and string? What luxuries! In my day we had to use coconut shells and vines...

Cybercriminals swipe 15.8M medical records from French doctors ministry

But don't worry, the personal details and biometrics of the 450+ million visitors to the EU each year now being added to the EES system are totally secure, forever, no chance of any hack, nope, no way, these aren't the droids you're looking for, move along, move along...

Brussels urged to pay 'sovereignty premium' to narrow China battery gap

Easy to talk about unit costs with a bunch of if's / but's / likely's / maybe's, and easy to spend other people's money - no mention of sinking the up front capital costs to get production in volume actually rolling, which won't happen unless those businesses get a guarantee on their investment, and of course no mention of the fact that neither China nor the US would take any onshoring attempt lying down, they would react and support their own businesses further if necessary.

Nice idea, never going to happen...

Stop macOS 26 nagging with one tiny policy tweak

Cheers Liam, I was not one of the 2.1m who had already seen that tweet (almost the whole of X's user base these days isn't it?) - absolute perfection - have a pint for pointing it out...

Every day in every way, passwords are getting worse and worse

Re: I suppose...

Sounds more like the ideal password for the "Andrew" formerly known as Prince...

Re: Hmmm

Hail Skroob!

Palantir spent $25M on CEO flights so Alex Karp could do all the talking

Wow, it's lucky then that that the UK Ministry of Defence, NHS, Cabinet Office, GCHQ, Home Office, Met Police, DEFRA, and Crown Commercial Service, can easily afford to foot that bill for him, and it must be ever such good value for them given that half of those contracts were signed without even needing competitive tenders, and ignoring any implications about data privacy...

Your AI-generated password isn't random, it just looks that way

I did a similar "random" experiment a while back, asking the Google Search "AI" to "roll" a six-sided dice and tell me the hypothetical answer - I then asked it to "re-roll" another 5 times - in the first six rolls, it gave me each number exactly once, and after a further 6 "re-rolls" it had given me each number exactly twice.

So it's supposed "intelligence" simply understood that a six-sided dice has six numbers, and if I asked six times, it saw nothing wrong with allowing the history of its previous answers to affect what number came up next to ensure that I saw all six numbers

It seems to be a fundamental problem with models like this - there is no understanding of the concept of randomness, so anything that requires a degree of entropy completely fails

You can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone, says Dutch defense chief

Re: eBay - he's right!

Complete with fake CE markings?...

UK.gov launches cyber 'lockdown' campaign as 80% of orgs still leave door open

Re: Platitudes

That right there hits the nail on the head - there is an incentive to do their accounts properly, due to the penalties of screwing up - the taxman always wants his pound of flesh (if you'll forgive both the choice of pronouns, and the catachresis of the original Shakespeare)

There is no such incentive to get Cybersecurity right, and there needs to be...

Re: Platitudes

Wow! I thought I was an old cynic, but you take it to a whole new level... ツ

Re: Pedant's Corner

Okey Dokey?...

Re: Platitudes

Most small business have no internal resources for Cyber security - the full UK.GOV article mentions "checking the locks", but frankly most small business owners don't even know where the "doors" are, let alone how to check the locks, so anything to raise awareness about how to start figuring these things out for a small business owner is a good start.

However, I'd go a step further, and try to think of sensible ways to incentivise proper certification - for instance, if the government started advertising to the masses to check that any business taking their personal info or credit card details had a minimum level of security, then that would go a long way, eventually maybe even making it mandatory in the same way as the "GasSafe" scheme.

I agree in isolation, not much use, but if it can be used as a foundation to be built upon, then it's not a bad place to start