Posts by Cruachan

Peace President's Iran war piles more pain on already battered PC market

Re: "Our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest."

"Don't flatter yourself, you egotistical kumquat."

Really? You think I'm taking credit for Trump? I also didn't say it was decided on the basis that Trump was in power, but there was a clear shift in the opinion polls when Trump started the 51st state and "Governor Trudeau" nonsense away from Poilievre. That pattern is carrying on across Europe at the moment, notably in Italy as well as Hungary and even AfD in Germany have publicly disagreed with MAGA recently

Re: "Our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest."

It'll be interesting to see what happens in Hungary, they're obviously worried about Orban losing which would (according to Magyar's campaign statements) lead to more EU integration and stop the vetos on anything anti-Russia.

Anti-Trump sentiment already turned the Canadian elections on their head and many of the far right parties they have endorsed are publicly against this war.

Re: 25th Amendment Time

Almost certainly not, and with my cynics hat on, he's probably making moves behind the scenes about it already but desperate not to invoke it too early. He's arrogant enough to think he can one day be President himself, so won't want to kick Trump out too early as serving more than half of Trump's term would count as one for him according to the 22nd Amendment.

Trump wants to take a battle axe to CISA again and slash $707M from budget

Given how much disinformation comes out of this administration it's no surprise they want t defund an organisation trying to combat it.

Also he needs money to re-open Alcatraz, as that idiotic plan has also resurfaced this week despite there being some very obvious more pressing issues that should be the focus at the moment.

I saw a news article this week where Russia denied he was an actual asset (I.e. knowingly working for them) but because he's so easily manipulated they consider him a "useful idiot"

Repopulate! Repopulate! Two lost Doctor Who episodes turn up in private collection

Re: Wiping moon landing video

Elvis was only put in to the video to distract from the German U-Boat that Hitler escaped in. It was in the Sunday Sport, so must be true.

Microsoft Copilot now boarding your health information

The bolting on of AI to everything kind of reminds me of the tablet "revolution" when it was a solution looking for a problem.

I'm sure there are a few good uses for AI, but health definitely isn't one of them. It certainly isn't good for "banter" about football teams given what Grok has been up to this week, and from my own experience it certainly isn't any good at judging what contracts I'm qualified for given how many cold calls I've had over the last month, only to then be ghosted when they read my CV (which is exactly the same as the Linkedin profile that AI matched me from in the first place.....)

Trump orders purge of 'woke' Anthropic from government

Re: Venn diagram of those MAGA and online trolls is pretty much just a circle though.

"I assumed the online trolls were being paid"

Some of them most definitely are. Dan Bongino admitted when he left the FBI to return to tolling that some of the things he says are paid for. The very fact that you can go from podcaster to FBI Deputy Director and back again pretty much tells you all you need to know about this administration though.

It's just another of Trump's meaningless insults. Being left of him politically leaves an awful lot of territory, and it includes all the "RINOs" in the GOP as he calls them.

"Owning the libs" is a political movement in the US, in the rest of the world it's the goal of online trolls. In the US the Venn diagram of those MAGA and online trolls is pretty much just a circle though.

How Microsoft's legal eagles wrangled Happy Days for Windows 95

Re: Those were the days

Wow, I'd have thought much higher from the amount I remember it getting played

It might be a change of circumstances, depends on how the rights were negotiated originally.

I recall many years ago that The Sisters of Mercy made a concert film, Wake, recorded at the Royal Albert Hall. They played a cover of Gimme Shelter and whilst rights were granted for the audio of the song, the publishers refused the "synchronisation rights" for the video performance and so it was removed from the film before release. Although (just ask The Verve) the publishers for The Rolling Stones are notoriously aggressive with their rights.

Re: Those were the days

"What I Am" was the song, Edie Brickell was a bit of a one hit wonder, in the UK anyway.

Elon Musk paints exodus of xAI co-founders as 'evolution'

Re: He isn't completely wrong

Just like the guy who disproved the existence of God due to the existence of the Babelfish, and then proved black was white and got killed on a Zebra Crossing.

Mine's the one with a five part trilogy in the pocket.

Re: Don't underestimate Elon Musk

Just because he and his cultists say he's the smartest does not make it true.

BBC bumps telly tax to £180 as Netflix lurks with cheaper tiers

Re: Well, that's all a bit ...

Sky and ITN (who produce ITV, Channel 4 and 5 news programmes) are at least committed to neutrality on their news programs the same as the BBC (I am not for a second saying that the BBC or Sky or ITN gets it right all the time, they're still run by people and people have agendas and beliefs and make mistakes). Print media in the UK is unashamedly biased and largely proud of it, and they've hated the BBC for years, partly because of the neutrality policy and also because since the smartphone revolution the BBC website has given away for "free" (paid for by the license fee) what their websites won't.

It's also clear that there is an appetite for public service broadcasting that caters to as many people as possible, if we look for example at the mass outrage when Mad Nad Dorries floated selling off Channel 4 (which although publicly owned, does not cost the taxpayers anything). That may of course just have been outrage against anything said by a woman who is pretty much always wrong.

Summoning the spirit of the BBC Micro with a Pi 500+ and a can of spray paint

Re: Memories

The Repton theme was a terrible earworm, almost as bad as Manic Miner and it's 8bit version of In the Hall of the Mountain King.

I've got BeebEm on my laptop, still play Arcadians and Citadel as well periodically.

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

Re: IPO Pumping

"What's that you say? The SEC has gone back to light touch regulation and self-certification?"

That was Elmo's reward for the ~$250m he spent to help get Trump back in to power, under the pretence of DOGE he gutted various agencies investigating or regulating his companies.

Pretty sure we'll find out that much like Tesla his pay packet is contingent on hitting stock valuation targets, and that there were some questionable trades made before this announcement by his confidantes.

Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

It's good news for all of us greybeards, who learnt about IT in the days of "don't put all your eggs in one basket", never mind a basket that belongs to someone else. Undoing all those cloud migrations because PHBs the world over demanded "cloud" without ever knowing what it meant or the potential consequences.

There was an argument for small businesses who could get access to email or ERP systems or other LOB apps more easily, when economies of scale meant that the providers could give access to companies who couldn't otherwise justify buying the software or the hardware to run it, but now we've gone too far the other way and many companies don't even offer an on-prem solution any more.

Trump promises nuclear datacenter permits in 3 weeks, calls Greenland 'big beautiful ice'

Re: Every accusation is a confession

It would be amusing watching his brain connecting the dots in real time, if it wasn't for the position he holds. Screaming "you don't even have elections" at Zelensky for example, you could see the naked ambition to declare martial law and I'm sure that will be tried around the midterms.

Ofcom keeps X under the microscope despite Grok 'nudify' fix

I'm surprised Musk caved as quickly as he did when California started investigating, he was still framing it as a free speech issue and the US Gov was sabre rattling as usual about consequences if the UK sanctioned X in any way. Given relations between California and the US Gov are not exactly friendly I was expecting more of a pushback, especially as the rumour is Musk is now back in the tent pissing out (what a shock that they want him back onside before the midterms....)

X sues to protect Twitter brand Musk has been trying to kill

Companies normally go to enormous lengths to prevent their trademarks becoming generic (E.g. Hoover instead of vacuum cleaner, Biro instead of ballpoint pen) but in this case someone bought one of the world's most recognisable brands, renamed it, and is now trying to protect the old name, which almost every website refers to like Prince when he was "the artist" or whatever variant. "X, formerly Twitter" is almost always what you see on news sites etc.

Datacenters planned for Scotland could end up draining a loch of power

Forgot about that one, went there many years ago as a kid although mainly to see the fish ladder on a school trip, I remember going over the dam but don't think we went in to the station.

If only I'd put (nuclear) in my post to avoid pedantry.

Pedant alert, I did.

Ha, yes, at least one!

There are actually quite a few, Torness has a visitor centre (nuclear) and so does Dounreay, although it's no longer in operation.

Whitelee Windfarm has a very good visitor centre and cafe, and is also great for cycling with miles of gravel tracks and a mountain bike park as well

https://www.scottishpower.com/pages/visitor_centres.aspx says that Tongland in Galloway has a visitor centre as well as Cruachan, but given that it mentions both Longannet and Cockenzie (closed in 2016 and 2013 respectively) it's less than current.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanark_Hydro_Electric_Scheme

Opened in 1926 and still operating today, unfortunately the stations aren't open for tours but New Lanark and the Falls of Clyde are well worth a visit for anyone in the area. The Falls are spectacular and despite the power stations the whole area is a nature reserve.

Nowhere to store the power is the issue as well, there are a few battery farms under development but nowhere near enough for all that power, and given that the cost to export to England is what killed Longannet (as well as it being coal) selling it isn't going to be option either.

Consent has long been in place to convert Sloy to pumped storage, but it hasn't happened and possibly never will due to non-native invasive fish in Loch Lomond and no way as yet to stop them getting in to the reservoir above.

With a bit of luck the AI bubble will burst before any of them get built anyway, seeing as that's what they'll get used for.

Microsoft appears to move on from its most loyal ‘customers’ – Contoso and Fabrikam

Re: MS has many more "brands" than just Contoso and Fabrikam

I recall Fourth or maybe 4th Coffee and Tailspin Toys as well from the far off days when I was doing MS certs on what seemed like a constant basis. Constant cycle of read a chapter that begins with "Don't use NETBIOS/WINS, it's outdated" and then they talk about it for ages as it's technically examinable. Much like the client OS exams where "boot to Last Known Good configuration" was almost always the answer for a boot failure question, ignoring that is never (IME) worked in the real world.

X's location tags remind users of the internet's oldest rule: Trust nothing

Re: Did anyone trust X before ?

Of course, I asked Grok if I should trust X and it said 100%, Elon is a righteous dude.

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

Copilot is just the new clippy to most people, if you want/need to use it that's fine but wait to be asked instead of shoe-horning it in to everything. Opened a PDF in Adobe read the other day, it defaulted to the new experience and started telling me that it was a long document, maybe I'd like an AI summary of it.

NO, I FUCKING WOULDN'T

Meanwhile Musk has gone full-blown Josie and the Pussycats by making Grok post about how great he is. Definition of garbage in, garbage out.

(It was a terrible film that was meant to be a satire on advertising and product placement, at the end the main villain’s master-plan is revealed as messages to tell everyone how great she is because she was an unpopular kid at school)

Why Elon Musk won't ever realize the shareholder-approved Tesla payout

Re: Insulting half of humanity

Depends where you are from, in Scotland that particular word is gender neutral and on an average weekend out you will often hear women referring to men using it.

VLC's keeper of the cone nets European free software gong

Culture warriors love getting upset over nothing. Some people weren't happy about the Duke of Wellington statue being given a blue and yellow Ukraine cover.

Friend recommended VLC to me in about 2006, been using it ever since.

Being Scottish, the traffic cone icon is nice too. The Duke of Wellington wouldn't look the same without his.

Win10 still clings to over 40% of devices weeks after Microsoft pulls support

Re: Bloat like never seen before

Not only that, organisations like the NCSC and others offer pre-configured templates of GPOs in a suggested configuration, which disables most if not all of the consumer features and sets the suggested security levels. I still see loads of companies refusing to deploy anything like that to avoid upsetting their users though.

Azure's bad night fuels fresh calls for cloud diversification in Europe

Re: Cloud of smoke

Kind of, but a lot of the promises on savings are that everything is opex and not capex. No (or far fewer) servers, lower costs on power and cooling and potentially fewer IT staff as well.

The day will no doubt come when a much bigger outage than this, or last week's AWS outage, or another CrowdStrike will destroy faith in cloud computing, and at that time the industry won't be able to adapt the other way quickly because so many firms are deprecating on-prem products.

Twist in Tesco vs. VMware case as Computacenter files claim against Broadcom, Dell

Re: Wrong way round.

There was a story a few years ago about BMW trying software reseller tactics. Can't remember which series of car it was, but they fitted all of them with all the optional extras like heated seats, but you had to pay a license fee to activate them. The backlash was huge.

Microsoft threatens to ram Copilot into Exchange Server on-prem

Re: Must admit I'm confused...

It'll probably try and keep going with a Python-esque "How shall we fuck off, O Lord?"

No option for "Our organisation has had Copilot forced upon it but we wish it would fuck all the way off"

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

Going to happen more and more as the big players gather more market share, until the bubble bursts and I spend the next 15 years undoing all the on-prem to cloud migrations I've done over the previous 15 (assuming of course that it's even an option to do so given that Microsoft, Atlassian and many others don't offer certain products on-premises anymore).

The real insight behind measuring Copilot usage is Microsoft's desperation

Billions in R&D and marketing across the industry, and what do we actually get from it? A summary of the top search results at the top of every Bing search and a button to launch Copilot on new computers.

Ofcom fines 4chan £20K and counting for pretending UK's Online Safety Act doesn't exist

Yeah, it should have been block lists at the router level, which bakes the age verification and the ability to turn the filters on or off in to the account holder, who has to prove who they are and be able to pay the bills to get connected anyway.

I think most people agree with the spirit of the OSA, keeping kids away from harmful material. As has been discussed here and in many other threads on this site, the implementation is an utter shitshow.

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

I'm a Windows sysadmin so always use Windows for obvious reasons. Don't have an issue with there being Macs in the environment as long as they are (as Malcolm Tucker would put it) NOMFUP and are managed by JAMF or whatever.

IME though, the biggest "use case" for getting a Mac is "do you know who I am?" or an unspoken "I need a shiny device to make it obvious I'm not a pleb."

Windows 95 was too fat to install itself so needed help from the slimmer 3.1

Re: Nothing ever changes

Triumph of marketing, under the hood Windows Vista was Windows 6 and Windows 7 was actually Windows 6.1 (8 was 6.2 and 8.1 6.3 if you were creating WMI queries in SCCM or similar to auto-populate collections and see what you had).

Even those looking back with misty eyes at XP forget it wasn't really "good" until SP2 came out, and that was also a very painful upgrade for a lot of people due to the massive changes in security.

Even fantasy money can buy a lot of power – just ask Larry Ellison

Stories like this always remind me of a story El Reg ran almost 14 years ago. At that time, BT's millions of miles of copper wires were (theoretically, the purity of the metal and cost of digging it up weren't factored in) worth more than the company was valued at at the time.

https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/22/bt_copper_cable_theft/

The whole thing is a house of cards these days, a company like that with a certain type of "leader" can become flavour of the month just because they are in favour or in this case someone else is out of favour because of their political views.

Appeals court blocks Trump bid to ax top copyright official in AI spat

Re: Krasnov

It seems it kinda does work like that, he just has to wait for the Supreme Court to step in and do what they're told.

Mega-and-MAGA deals position Oracle's Larry Ellison to overtake Elon

BBC is reporting Ellison is already ahead of Musk

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2rp992y88o

Either way, a fresh round of "my hollowed out volcano lair is bigger than yours" is likely to ensue, and Ellison will probably win, at least for now, as he and Mango Mussolini haven't fallen out yet.

VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong

I've mentioned this before on similar stories, I've worked more with Hyper-V than VMware as I've worked in the public sector a lot - they get favourable discounts and the licensing makes sense if you don't need all of the features VMware offers and are a 100% or close to Microsoft shop.

Often when I work in the private sector, Hyper-V gets mocked. This happened to me last year working at a very large company using VMware running on Cisco Hyperflex hardware. Until the Cisco Hyperflex hardware started taking 24 hours or more to upgrade to supported firmware versions if it worked at all, and the VMware licensing renewal quote came in, at which point Hyper-V and Nutanix and other vendors suddenly became viable options.

This company isn't Tesco big, but they were looking at migrating ~350 or so servers cross-platform as being a cheaper option than renewing with VMware, at which point you know the piss is being taken.

After nearly half a century in deep space, every ping from Voyager 1 is a bonus

Simply incredible that they keep going. Built and launched before I was born (not by much though) and given how I feel today after doing the Tour de 4 (Sir Chris Hoy's charity bike ride) yesterday, a great deal more functional too.

Space Command gets Trumped out of Colorado, voting conspiracy cited

Re: Message from Donald J Trump, President Of The United States

Buono Estente. Heth-eth heth heth heth heth Chris Waddle. Scorchio.

Boutros Boutros Ghali!

Supermarket giant Tesco sues VMware, warns lack of support could disrupt food supply

Re: A perpetual licence is just that.

"I can't see how Broadcom can win this"

I would tend to agree, except IANAL and we pretty much all thought HP would lose the Autonomy case in the UK courts but win the US, but the opposite happened.

If Broadcom keep doing this though, they'll turn in to Oracle and start REALLY taking the piss on licensing. I used to work for an Emergency Service and they wanted to migrate some Oracle databases. There was no direct migration path due to versions, there had to be some intermediate steps and Oracle being Oracle demanded 6 figures worth of one-time use intermediate licenses for the project.