Posts by Brave Coward

Britain's billion-pound F-35s not quite ready for, well, anything

Re: Well, this still is a way for being stealth, isn't it?

Hiding in a sealed hangar in Kerala...

Stopping the rot when good software goes bad means new rules from the start

So Fripp, Lake & Sinfield where wrong after all...

... 21th Century Man will be paranoid, not schizoid, in the court of the Orange King...

EU-sponsored report says GenAI's 'fair use' defense does not compute

Does not compute indeed

There's no way an AI, no matter how sophisticated, could ever figure out **which** Jose Arcadio we're talking about in Marquez's masterpiece.

He he he...

How to trick ChatGPT into revealing Windows keys? I give up

Re: The future of AI

I give up.

Former and current Microsofties react to the latest round of layoffs

Revelation, revolution?

So it looks like El Reg commentards are discovering the class struggle all of a sudden?

Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown

Surely there should be a code freeze on a Friday

... unless, while dealing with freezers, you are ready to cope with a Fry Day !

Tape, glass, and molecules – the future of archival storage

Re: The DNA message

Nah. It would most probably read : 'This stuff is protected by copyright. You may only copy, modify, distribute, display, license, or sell the content if you are granted explicit permission within the End-User License Agreement (EULA) '.

Signed: God, Inc.

RIP: Bill Atkinson, co-creator of Apple Lisa and Mac

Thank you Liam for this much needed and quite detailed eulogy. He was a great man.

And I'm rather sad there is no such exciting and creative, powerful yet simple tool like HyperCard anymore !

Google outfoxed by crafty squatters in $1B London HQ's rooftop garden

Fox News

All Google has to do is to fire fox.

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

Sorry this is entirely off-topic, but...

... not a single word in El Reg today about the passing of Bill Atkinson?

Odd homage to '2001: A Space Odyssey' sees 'Blue Danube' waltz beamed at Voyager 1

Re: "it is likely We Are Not Alone"

The truth is : we are not alone. They are.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Static HTML pages

Yeah, result guaranteed to be awkward.

Amazon tested warehouse robots and found they're not ready to replace humans

Re: Success!

'The new mantra is to move fast and break things'.

Or is it to move thin until you break fast?

OpenBSD 7.7 released with updated hardware support, 9Front ships second update of 2025

Re: Re. OpenBSD's partitioning scheme

@Liam,

May I respectfully ask you why people wanting full-disk encryption via LUKS are fully entitled to be called 'poor schmucks'?

Downward DOGE: Elon Musk keeps revising cost-trimming goals in a familiar pattern

Re: what to do with J.D. Vance? Send him to El Salvador?

I for one wouldn't. Such an effective pope killer is for sure an asset that the Land of the Freethinkers shouldn't deprive herself from.

You never know when it might come handy.

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

Re: Econ 101

Well... may I humbly remind you that the very, truly liberal government of Great Britain was only too happy to let millions of Irish people starve during the Great Famine, on the grounds that it was too expensive to help them, and that the state should not take the place of the market?

So much for empathy, then...

Dash to Panel lives on, thanks to Zorin sponsorship

@Liam

Sorry, but the first link ('The popular extension for the GNOME desktop...') is broken. There's a faulty '67' in the string.

Malware in Lisp? Now you're just being cruel

So...

From ELIZA to ELUDA ?

From MP3 to Web3 to now 3D, Napster gets a new owner

Matt Zhang said...

"Music x Web3 is one of the most exciting spaces we've come across, and we are thrilled … to unlock value for the entire ecosystem and revolutionize how artists and fans enjoy music."

Wow... my corporate bullshitometer just blew off - with one sentence.

Although I'm a little surprised M. Zhang didn't speak of fans 'consuming' music.

Satya Nadella says AI is yet to find a killer app that matches the combined impact of email and Excel

AI killer App

As far as I know, a small country in the West Bank I wouldn't dare put an name on, has already used AI as a killer app.

With God's approval, natch.

Wozniak: I didn't reduce chip count for manufacturing. I wanted to prove I was clever

Apples and juice

> "Everything in technology grows hugely, but now it's consolidated to basically a few main companies that control everything [...]"

So, capitalism as usual, isn't it ?

HP CEO pay for 2024 = 261,658 toner cartridges

Lores said...

> 'Lores said in the proxy statement document that he is "confident in our ability to capitalize [...] "'

Well, his own ability to capitalize is absolutely out of question.

SpaceX says bad vibes most likely cause of Starship 7 flop

SpaceX and bad vibes is indeed what it's all about.

Are you cooler than ex-Apple design guru Sir Jony Ive?

Re: So bland and boring it's a surprise that all his products weren't beige

> 'someone who listens to John Coltrane and Aphex Twin probably wouldn't end up designing featureless rectangular black slabs that sell by the truckload'

... neither would someone listening to Fela Anikulapo Kuti's 'International Thief Thief', I guess.

IBM Consulting workers told management wants to 'more closely align pay, performance'

Recursion is a dangerous tool

> 'IBM says its data indicates "we haven't done a good enough job of differentiating and rewarding top performers [...]"'

So according to their own words, top management did not perform. Hence will be barred from any bonuses, should GDP be funded.

Elon Musk calls for International Space Station to be deorbited by 2027

Deorbited ?

Why wouldn't M. Musk get off his shiny little keyboard and mind his own business for a while ?

Like, for example, stop allowing pieces of his own rockets to fall on random European countries ? (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62z3vxjplpo)

RIP Raymond Bird: Designer of UK's first mass-produced business computer dies aged 101

'Don't tell me no-one came up with any birdbrain jokes'

We wouldn't be able to swallow them.

Sri Lanka goes bananas after monkey unplugs nation

Legal disclaimer

Any resemblance to simian behavior in the power field of the US of A being purely coincidental, of course, and shouldn't be regarded as a proper analogy.

DeepSeek rated too dodgy down under: Banned from Australian government devices

Wonder

'And of course let’s not forget China’s national security and counterespionage laws that are widely felt to mean Chinese companies must share info with Beijing when asked to do so.'

So what's the difference with the US of A national security and counterespionage laws?

Welsh woman fined for flatulence-fueled cyber harassment

Strangest story I've read this year

So fart.

DeepSeek's not the only Chinese LLM maker OpenAI and pals have to worry about. Right, Alibaba?

President Trump has been very clear on this topic.

'Qwen 2.5 Max that it reckons not only outperforms DeepSeek's V3 [...] but trounces America's top models.'

President Trump has been very clear on this topic: America's top models are going to marry (WASP) Americans, raise children and do the cooking. There is no way they would be trounced by hostile Chinese Qwen or others.

Vodafone aims to offer satellite-to-phone connectivity starting later this year

Re: What were the momentous first words spoken?

Sorry, no Sir. Only fucking quid-ing you.

You probably have more CIO experience than the incoming White House CIO

Re: Simple test

Oh! I thought a wireshark was a shark that doesn't have any functional blue teeth.

Always pleased to learn.

BT unplugs plans to turn old cabinets into EV chargepoints

Re: Yes but no but ….

An explanation here :

https://www.slangsphere.com/what-is-bfe-slang/

Disclaimer : I have no interest of any kind related to that website.

Trump's freshly minted meme coin passes $10B market cap

Re: Pump & Dump

'If I buy up all the coin, do I own her?'

Beware. You would be a chained bloke.

Re: I despair for Humanity...

Well, I recently noticed that the entry for 'Earth' in the HHGttG has been automatically updated (a security fix) and now reads 'Mostly helpless'.

Sonos CEO steps down after smart speaker app upgrade hit bum note

$1,875,000 severance payment

And these are the people who would use every possible stage they can access to brag about "taking risks", "being brave" and "getting out of one's comfort zone".

TSMC revenue booms and you don’t need AI to figure out why

Singapore police allowed to run scam victims’ bank accounts

Does that apply to Microsoft subscribers too ?

Is that a bird’s nest, a wireless broadband base station, or both?

Additional benefit for Ms. white-bellied Sea Eagle

... is that she can now, in real time and free of charge, post a message on Instagram in the ilk of :

'Look ! I just laid an egg!'

... and get about 5 000 replies, all reading like 'Congrats!', 'I love it!', 'How nice!' and so on.

Can AWS really fix AI hallucination? We talk to head of Automated Reasoning Byron Cook

Re: The answer is No - No - No!

Sorry Sir, but I'm afraid you're hallucinating too.

It's pretty obvious that the Capital of Japan is "J".

With datacenter power crisis looming, US government looks to Constellation

Re: 1 million megawatt hours [...] could power upward of one million homes.

Did you need to put them on charge every night, or what ?

It's only a matter of time before LLMs jump start supply-chain attacks

So let's recapitulate...

... what tech has been about these last twenty years:

a) social medias. Crap.

b) crypto-money. More crap.

c) LLM, sold as "artefactual intelligence". Still more crap.

Brilliant. Thank you very much, tech bros.

Parker Solar Probe set for blisteringly hot date with the Sun on Christmas Eve

Carefull with that axe, Eugene.

So the late Mr. Parker would probably be very pleased to know that the shiny little toy named after him is ready to plunge in the Howlin (solar) Wind, thanks to the Heat Treatment it benefited, and while Squeezing out Sparks in Another (scientific) Grey Area and trying to answer Burning Questions, its Steady (electronic) Nerves will hopefully prevent it from being Struck by Lighting, for the Stupefaction of us mere mortals.

And all these prodigious achievements thanks to Venus courteously providing the Up Escalator free of charges.

Gra - a - hem.

$800 'AI' robot for kids bites the dust along with its maker

Can we make an exception...

... for smarties ?

Google Timeline location purge causes collateral damage

Re: Being old-school...

Funny you mentioned it.

I just happened to re-read this week-end my personal paper diary from 1977, to help fix some memory leakage.

I *very much* doubt that any of the current smartphone aficionados will be able in fifty years to get *any* sort of clues on what their life has been back then.

Alibaba exec trashes his own staff and customers, quickly apologizes

So...

... the shit hit the Fan, after all. Or is it the other way around?

Mysterious outbreak with high fatality rate in the DRC could imperil tech supply chains

Disgusting

'If the unknown disease manages to spread beyond the remote villages of Kwango Province, there's the risk it could end up disrupting supplies of critical minerals used in a variety of technology products.'

Human life losses? Human **african** life losses? Who cares?

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

My tupence

Copilot being described as a ‘generative assistant’, my first thought was : put it in somebody’s genitalia, but I was afraid this might sound somewhat crude.

So I’ll go for the Lode Runner game instead. I mean, Lode Runner and Wile Copilot is guaranteed to be a huge success, isn't it ?

Panasonic brings its founder back to life as an AI

Pesky acronyms

'Panasonic's Peace and Happiness through Prosperity (PHP)'

Now *THAT*'s an explanation at least !

Chinese boffins find way to use diamonds as super-dense and durable storage medium

'Looks better on your beloved's finger than a Blu-ray, too'

... especially considering what a hard drive it has been to convince him/her to marry you!