Posts by AbominableCodeman

Tesla Cybertruck recall #8: Exterior trim peels itself off, again

Re: All the idiots vandalising Tesla dearlerships are wasting their time

Thst reads like projection to me. Is that you Donnie? Time for your dried frog pills.

Privacy warriors whip out GDPR after ChatGPT wrongly accuses dad of child murder

The mandatory certification of chartered software engineers is long overdue.

Re: No care, no responsibility

Apparently the Tesla delivered to Trump had 57 recall notices against it. I would be interested how many recall notices were typically raised against a car from the 90's containing no software. and in the pursuit of balance raise against a modern non Tesla model.

City council rejects inquiry into £130M Oracle IT disaster

Re: Heads should roll

Fun fact, I was looking at the obfuscated code for <major system currently used in many UK councils> and found a copyright notice* from 1982 attributed to Bull.

*I'm not entierly sure if a simple SQL query to select financial values between 2 dates is actually copyrightable, but here we are.

AI running out of juice despite Microsoft's hard squeezing

Re: What's the next boondoggle?

"the output of which is freely available (no licence required) to anyone—the Sun"

I'm sure someone, somewhere is working on fixing that.

Here's the ugliest global-warming chart you'll ever need to see

Re: Denialists - move 'm to the beach

Sea level change is too slow. I suggest we move them to the equator and give them a blog so they can tell us what life is like at 50C+ in the shade.

Re: FWIW

Oh some studies much earlier than 1970 knew what was coming. The Exxon one in the 1950s for instance. A shame they just used the results to prepare thier propaganda.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

Re: Farking bastards...

Haveing recently replaced a loved one's HP due to it being non functional 50% of the time when it couldn't dial the mothership, (rural broadband for the win). Epson ecotank and Brother colour lasers seem the least enshittified at this point.

Hundreds of Dutch medical records bought for pocket change at flea market

Re: proper test data

That's fine for isolated systems, a tad harder for integeration and similar, where your project has to talk to another data source that expects to have matching records and state.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Re: I agree with the majority of the article...

I have had much success running Such windows programs as 3DS Max, CS2 and Maya in Steam, and found it a lot easier to set up as "Games" than doing the same in Wine.

China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

Re: Interesting

That doen't help if the training set doesn't contain the censored material in the first case.

As this model appears to be trained on synthetic data, just tack "and never ever mention winnie the pooh" on the end of the system prompt for the sybnthetic data source AI.

Meta's pay-or-consent model under fire from EU consumer group

Re: no right to complain

See mentions of shadow accounts above. You still get your data collected, even if you don't play.

Re: EU enforcement authorities already allow Pay or Okay

As an added bonus they now have your payment card details to unequivocally identify you.

UK businesses eye AI as the cheaper, non-whining alternative to actual staff

Re: @wolfetone

It would appear I touched a nerve. Was it a little close to home, sir? What model do you have a Vogue, Evoque?

Re: @wolfetone

I couldn't agree more. If the poors don't have access to daddy's money to set up thier own plantation, well they should just work harder. It's so very tiersome having to listen to the poors whining about 'cost of living', do they have any idea how much it costs to run a Gulf Stream for a year? I wish they would just shut up and get on finishing my next Range Rover.

Imagine a land in which Big Tech can't send you down online rabbit holes or use algorithms to overcharge you

Re: I have to admit

Is there any ideology or organisation structure that is devoid of using 'think of the children' or similar to overstep privacy boundaries and enforce control? Left or right, public or private, at some point "improving customer experience", or "protecting the public" always seem to turn into increased monetisation or power. As it ever has been, it will always continue.

Re: Can they get rid of other commercial website b.s. too ?

They have learned that from Amazon then

The deals page lists a card with "Samsung TVs from $69", on clicking on the card you then get an item listing with a range of regulaly priced TVs and a $69 accesory wall mounting bracket.

UK council still hadn't fully costed troubled Oracle project 2 years in

'lessons learned'

Did WSCC look at Birmingham CC's current situation and decide 'Yes, we want some of that"?

Perhaps they should have a chat with thier neighbours at Brighton and East Sussex, they seem to have divested thier outsourcing and gone in- house quite successfully.

Microsoft shuttering dedicated licensing education, certification site

I like how they use 'unable' as a synonym for 'refuse'. Also 50 modules to learn about licencing! I'm sure the EU commision has some views on vexatiously complex licencing structures, and if they don't, they bloody well should have.

Microsoft flashes Win10 users with more full-screen ads for Windows 11

Re: Win11 isn't that bad...

VR was my last sticking point for getting off windows too. You might want to check out the ALVR project, it's a bit of a faff to get working, but provides a competent Linux VR implimentation foer Steam based games

Smart homes may be a bright idea, just not for the dim bulbs who live in 'em

Well, this is El Reg's comment section...you seem to have forgotten where you are!

Office 2024 unveiled for Microsoft 365 refuseniks

Re: But the important parts are not fixed.....

Not for want of trying to stop users shoehorning Excel to be a database, we've got edicts from on high not to use it in such a way, legal regulations regarding such behaviour, and a development department ready to satisfy evey data and application need.

I think introducing miscreant's fingers to 'the bench vice of enlightnment' is may be the only option.

Re: But the important parts are not fixed.....

Or "any field with a slash in it is a date"

Or "lt looks like you're tring to input a long/lat, let me mash it with a float for you"

Or Copy paste adding arbitary CR/LF to the copied cell contents depending on if MOD(RND)=7

$org is trying to save £24M, yet wont consider LibreOffice, I suspect mainly because of M$ marketing warfare...it certainly can't be because O365 is actually good.

Harvard duo hacks Meta Ray-Bans to dox strangers on sight in seconds

Re: As a good American...

'stop it from working' an interesting proposal, which would probably involve nuking linkedin/facebook/ecquifax/transunion and any number of huge data harvesters from orbit, i suspect this would meet quite some resistance.

Maybe the problem lies not with the AFR, but with the unconstrained data harvesting and people throwing thier PII up on the internet without consideration, that preceeded it?

Valve powers up Arch Linux – because who needs Windows when you have a Steam Deck?

Re: Woa - desktops = production??

It would be a difficult metric to measure I would think. Considering how many 'ship of theseus' thier desktops from one decatde to the next. I made the mistake of bying a dell off the shelf desktop once, never again, it was literally engineered landfill with misleading specs and a support scam attached. On the other hand I have 3 machines for coding and 3d design all in cases hailing from the late 90's and '00s. How can one possibly measure 'desktop' sales when I imagine the majority of desktop owners get them specifically for the ability to incrementally upgrade.

Capita wins £135M extension on much-delayed UK smart meter rollout

Re: £5 a month saving

Isn't the current hot water and central heating fashion to have a combi boiler without an immersion or hot water storage tank anyway? I know I get interesteng comments from the gas inspector about my old but fully functional and safe 40 year old CH setup when they see the storage tank.

I'm not sure how one would heat the water off peak for use later without anywhere to store aforsaid pre-heated water.

Elon's latest X-periment: Blocked users can still stalk your public tweets

Re: and once again

Oh my sweet summer child, if only it were that easy.

You use DNS? an ISP? You have relatives and friends with Whatspp on thier phones or who use social media themselves, you have a mobile phone (let alone 'smart')? Need to use unicorn sites that won't work without JS?

You are still very much tracked. Much as we may catch a murderer by his 3rd cousin's DNA. You need to make that medical appointment or book that ticket on some bloated, badly written wordpress site which uses google fonts.

The only way to win is not to play.

Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!

Thank The Good Lord Gaben

Luckily due to the sterling efforts of Valve, it's getting increasingly difficult to find software that won't run on Linux, even really esoteric, expensive software (and at least Linux still works with weird old serial devices). My windows 10 Box has been relegated to a headless install that only ever is accessed via Steam link when I want a VR fix (the one last windows hold-out). Come 2025 it will get some nice firewall rules, and I'll be done with M$ bovine excretions.

Other than that I went fully Linux 4 years ago and have never looked back, and that's after a fair few decades as a Windows fanboy, but M$ have worked so diligently at alienating their user-base with needless UI change for change's sake, slurp and adware. And to think "retraining users to a new OS" used to be the C-suite excuse not to move to Linux, now Mint is more windows than Windows is.

Neuralink reportedly under investigation by Uncle Sam for 'animal welfare violations'

Re: Not if you want a decent quality product that works properly.

I assume this is for some very specific and narrowly defined specification for 'it works'. It certainly works for me when I get a contract to clean up a bunch of Agile technical debt and allows me to ask some fun questions like:

Have you ever heard of optimisation an Karnaugh maps?

Why is the no input validation anywhere.

Why are these debug options available to users.

Why are these hard coded credentials here.

These questions are invariably answered by the catch all "we didn't have time on the sprint'.

Less sprinting, less 'rituals' and a bit more quiet contemplation about best practices, now that will be $400 ...per hour.

Re: Not if you want a decent quality product that works properly.

With the corollary that any time you're doing Agile, and it's inevitably not working, some Agile cultist will tell you you're doing it wrong, or using the wrong flavour. One begs the question after 30 years of being subjected to Agile, is it actually possible to do right?

Taiwan bans state-owned devices from running Chinese platform TikTok

Re: Their device

I am confused by any organisation that allows their issued devices to have ANY user installed applications on them. I know my org spends a considerable amount on mobile management software to prevent exactly that kind of thing.

Uber fined $14m for lying to get customers to ditch cabs

Re: I really dislike UberEats

I don't think you being in Eastern Europe is a factor. The road etiquette of the scooter delivery riders is crap everywhere.

In my city they completely disregard pedestrian only spaces, I overlook a pedestrian square bordered on all sides by restaurants, the number of 'roo delivery guys who mount the pavement and shoot across the square full of children playing, without decelerating until they get to their target restaurant is beyond counting. They ignore one-way systems, park their rides on the pavements, and gangs of them clog up motorcycle parking bays while waiting for orders on a regular basis.

Women sue Apple claiming AirTags helped their stalkers

You don't even have to spend that much money if you're handy with ESP32/8266 and a soldering iron, you can knock up a sub-25 mm3 GPS module that will run for months off a 1000mAh Lipo, consisting of off the shelf parts for less than $10.

Barge off: Nautilus to bring floating datacenters to two new sites in US, France

Re: well yes, but no?

Just throw the heat exchangers over the side and convince the local greens that converting their local harbour to a jacuzzi and that tropical fish are perfectly indigenous, is a good thing?

Microsoft reportedly mulls a does-everything 'super app' to expand mobile search

Re: I actually ...

As someone who finally bit the bullet and went filly Linux this year because of win 11 trash (and Valves sterling efforts to getting everything I consider essential on windows running in Linux) ...you seem to have forgotten the punchline.

Re: does-everything 'super app'

In my day, we used to call that an operating system.

Musk's Hotel California erected at Twitter HQ, as some offices converted into bedrooms

Re: "Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade."

Shirly if everyone is exceptional, then no-one is.

You get the internet you deserve

Text content mills? How quaint.

I'm afraid the article author is rather late to the party, the content mills have already gone well beyond anachronistic text sites for their revenue.

I suggest they go study the field of automated AI Youtube channels, such as Spark and Future Unity (which I suspect is a front for the CCP), with appropriate setup, you can churn out multiple apparently high production value videos a day

Software company wins $154k for US Navy's licensing breach

Hang on, isn't the typical "number of pirated copies" levied against pirates, as mandated by the RIAA and MPAA. The number of potentially downloaded copies* raised to the power of number of MOSFETS ever manufactured, multiplied by the time to the heat death of the universe, measured in microseconds. There appears to be some discrepancy here...

*A random number between 8e7 and 8e9.

Nvidia's datacenter growth can't save it from gaming GPU woes

Re: Oh, this is good news...

"Don't forget, the gamer crowd is going to get smaller over time as the console kiddies age. "

I don't think you understand the gaming market, the reasons for wanting a general purpose computer over a console, have not changed since it was Atari 2600 vs Sinclair spectrum, 40 years ago.

Better quality graphics, pron, content creation, modding, not loosing your purchased content each generation, FPS games, and the general anti consumer/walled garden behaviour of console manufacturers will ensure the PC master race's survival for some time yet.

Microsoft makes a game of Team building, with benefits

Re: No more physical activity

At least Teams stand-ups are not intrinsically discriminatory against people with lower limb and back problems like real stand ups.

Me in my large overcoat trying to not look like I'm actually sitting down ->

Re: "foster close and collaborative relationships"

Mr Braff has clearly never observed a public DOTA/Overwatch/Team Fortress game.

India follows EU's example in requiring USB-C charging for smart devices

Indeed, one of the notable design features of the Nintendo switch is no protection on the rx/tx lines. With only 0.3 mm separation between the 4 USB-C VCC and rx/tx line conductors, any guesses as to what one of the most common failure modes is?

Icon for the state of the switch's APU during a frantic game session with the USB plugged in.

Z-Library operators arrested, charged with criminal copyright infringement

Re: Textbooks...

Then you've missed the latest fashion for omitting vital parts of the text and making them only available through the use of single use passcodes contained in the textbook.

Re: Wrong Target

Don't forget to get this years version, which is identical to last year's. Apart from the arbitrarily reordered chapters, and the answers to the in-text exercises available only through a website, that can only be accessed using DRM serialised single use codes in the hard copy.

FTX disarray declared 'unprecedented' by exec who cleaned up after Enron

Re: the accounting business that supposedly vetted the company's numbers

I've done quite some impressive work on NPC AI in my time. I'm sure someone could populate a busy looking metaoffice with more convincing simulacrums of humans than some of the real fleshbags I've met in suits over the years.

Nvidia faces lawsuit for melting RTX 4090 cables as AMD has a laugh

Re: RE: failed connector

Forgive me, I may have missed the bit where Steve caveated the all cases with 'apart from these ones with FOD, and from the other connector supplier'.

I was dealing with exactly how I was going to correlate 2 customer datasets. Where in one of them, the system supplier appears to have decided that 'input validation is for the weak', and the users have discovered the forename field is a great place to put freeform notes. It has not been a good week.

I can assure you, I agree wholeheartedly with you regarding the poncy conductor thickness/cost-cutting/connector walled garden strategy, and I for one will not be purchasing a GPU where the power connector has, apparently, a 40 insertion lifespan.

Gamer's Nexus on YT recently put up a video where they sent a number of failed connectors to a failure analysis lab, in all cases the lab thought the fault was down to incorrect installation due to not seating the connector correctly. So the lawyers may get short shrift if these things are looked at, at microscopic scales.

Though there certainly is an argument to made that the connector lacks feedback such as a positive click or visually confirmable mechanism for the user to validate the connector is correctly inserted.

Even more argument could be made that Nvidia might have been negligent in putting the connector on the outboard side of a card that is difficult to fit in the most generous case without excessively bending the power cable and placing strain on the connector.

IBM to fire Watson IoT Platform from its cloud

Re: Sad

When you're at the point you can strip down commodity IOT devices, and re-flash them to run Tasmota against Home Assistant, you can usually think of some fun and useful things to do with a $2 near infra-red laser diode.