Posts by 'bluey

Microsoft stitches transactional databases to Fabric analytics system

Re: "building AI features into transactional systems"

> a giant tombola of probabilities

That's GenAI isn't it? :D

Chap claims Atari 2600 'absolutely wrecked' ChatGPT at chess

But was ChatGPT as disappointed..

as we were when we opened our birthday presents and our parents had bought us Atari Chess???

Musk and Trump take slap fight public as bromance ends

Re: Side effect

Especially in Zuck, Cook and Bezos' local store :D

They must be watching laughing.

Meta – yep, Facebook Meta – is now a defense contractor

Re: Still waiting...

It's strange tech - most of us use it, think "this is amazing", then some time later realise we were never drawn to use it again.

Personally I like it, and there has to be a use in industrial and military applications, but big tech's slurping of user (and passer by) data would stop me using it.

Given the money Meta invested in the device and user interaction side of VR / AR (under the metaverse fiasco), I can see why the military want it.

China to visit Earth’s ‘quasi-moon’ and bring a chunk of it back home

Re: Elon

It really does say a lot! I wonder if he uses FSD on his Tesla? :D

What would a Microsoft engineer do to Ubuntu? AnduinOS is the answer

Re: Wrong approach

I have this conversation about Kubernetes... contractors are desperate to get it on their CV, so we get CV driven design.

Re: "reshapes GNOME in the image of Windows 11"

Windows ME was the only Microsoft product that my buddy at Microsoft would acknowledge was shit.

He'd defend everything else to the death - laughably so - and / or complain people didn't understand the vision.

Re: WINE

Whoa, saucer of milk for Liam!

China finds a previously unknown microbe on its space station

Re: May be easier than a lab in Wuhan...

The thought of the BBC "fact checking" is hilarious

Apple to add fresh accessibility features for 2025

Re: Global Accessibility Awareness Day...

....and has horrendous - and near useless - parental controls (like the rest of big tech) because trapping the next generation of users is more important than keeping them safe.

Trump says he has a problem if Apple builds iThings in India

Re: Damn, Tim

Jeez, did he? I was impressed that I hadn't heard anything and wasn't on any of the photos I saw.

Damn, Tim

You really should have contributed to Trump's inauguration...

Bezos cost Amazon more than Jassy did in 2024 compensation stakes

Re: Simple

I think you got the context wrong there champ

Re: Simple

> The plebs always have the choice of opening their own companies.

Do they really mate? Check out the backgrounds of tech business leaders... they've done superbly, credit to them, but most had a step up from the start. Just getting to university is difficult from a lot of backgrounds.

You think ransomware is bad now? Wait until it infects CPUs

Re: Physical Write-Protect Switches

The whole industry is so obsessed with automation, you can imaging the screaming...

Nip chip smugglers by building trackers into GPUs, US Senator suggests

Re: Nope. Nope nope nope.

Oracle would love this in its license audits..

UK bans game controller exports to Russia in bid to ground drone attacks

Re: PMSL

Damn, still remember my delight and pride when I got my first Kempston controller..

Hey Google, if Chrome is going to be single soon, OpenAI is interested

Microsoft must be laughing..

EU lands 25% counter tariff punch on US, Trump pauses broad import levy hike – China excepted

> Capitalism pushed production offshore, not the Chinese/Taiwan, Malaysia

Yeah, he seems to forget this... American companies and capitalists took their production offshore.

Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition

+1 on Win2k... sad thing is, back then Windows actually looked like it was going to turn into a great OS. Looked like it was going somewhere.

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

Re: Sad

True... interested only in the share price going up, nothing else. Company could sell shit rolled in glitter (just like Microsoft) for all they care.

Trump's Dept of Transport hits brakes on Biden’s EV charger build-out

Re: Meanwhile at a secret lair somewhere…

Yeah, was wondering how this would affect absolutely not a pedo guy Musk.

Arm gives up on killing off Qualcomm's vital chip license

surely this is a legal failure in ARMs original Ts&Cs....??

I mean, lawsuits about transferring licenses have been going on forever... remember Gates and Allen buying the original DOS and giving the author a license to install it for free? There used to be an aftermarket for Windows licenses too didn't there from old equipment?

I'd have thought any license now stipulates exactly what happens if the recipient is bought / sold / tries to sell the license.

Pornhub lockdown and fact-free Zuckbots – welcome to 2025

Re: It's an easy go to

> All the more a bastard when you are not from the US or have english as your first language

LOL, yeah, I still need to work out who Mia Farrow was.

Re: It's an easy go to

Use the age verification from Leisure Suit Larry and the Lounge Lizards from years ago, that was a bastard even when well over 18.

UK prepared to throw planning rules out the window for massive datacenters

don't get excited, your politicians are only going to fuck it up

Microsoft trims jobs as new year begins

Re: They cut "from bottom up"

I think this is everywhere now. Companies used to exist for their shareholders / owners, customers and even their staff "partners".

Now every layer of management, even very low level ones, seem to think the company exists for them.

including roles in its security division

Wait, what, they have a security division??? Who knew?

It's been 20 years since Oracle bought two software rivals, changing the market forever

"any project, product, or portfolio named Fusion is a hodgepodge of incompatible technologies"

When I was a young, wet behind the ears graduate many decades ago, a wise old fart explained that the more gung ho a product's name, the shitter it actually is.

That rule has really stood the test of time.

For the other now-old farts out there, he was explaining this and using JSA (that fucking awful contractors account) and their Contractor+ package as an example.

25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then

Re: Y2K Today

> Reasons Y2K today would be worse than the real Y2K was are:

And.... while there are some AMAZING devs coming through, and I do mean AMAZING, average quality is well down and a "full stack dev" LOL wouldn't stand a chance.

There, I said it.

an IT community that came together to solve a fundamental problem - LOL

Don't romanticise us, it was coz they paid us gazillions!!!

We came together like the porn stars we are - repeatedly, on demand and straight into someone's eye.

Apple offers to settle 'snooping Siri' lawsuit for an utterly incredible $95M

so it's true

A grad I know had a very offline chat with his mates to decide the one subject they would have no interest in, had never search for, and wasn't part of their lives - they decided on crochet.

Then they spent 10 minutes in the pub with their phones on the table discussing crochet.

The next day, sure enough, crochet adds were in their feeds. Goes to show some of these rumours were true.

OpenAI plans to ring in the New Year with a for-profit push

Re: Hang on

> They're expecting people to PAY for this dross?

I pay for it... I have a rule where I will pay for one LLM at a time (so the subscriptions don't mount up).

They are great at what I'm weak at... repetitive coding tasks, coding tasks I know how to do but get bored working in my comfort zone, investment analysis (I go waaaaay deeper than LLMs, but they're a great start), and - most importantly - summarising and writing documents without sounding semi-literate.

If others don't like them, I'm fine with that. But I get fantastic benefits.

Christmas 1984: The last hurrah for 8-bit home computers

Re: "if I couldn't write a mouse driver, I didn't deserve a mouse."

I hope the cock that said that reads this article with shame...

And the brits wonder why none of their small companies can become big.

Rocks from Chinese Moon mission suggest Luna's history needs revision

Re: 'bluey

er, yes AC.... profound....

Re: Chinese scientists think it's time to rewrite the Moon's history

"Dark side" means facing away from earth. It has the same amount of sunlight as any other part of the moon.

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

Chinese scientists think it's time to rewrite the Moon's history

Probably because these rocks are actually from the moon...

Taiwan in talks to tap Amazon's Project Kuiper space broadband

Re: This would make a lot of sense to me.

"Taiwan knows musk is not only unreliable, probably compromised, but is also subject to the whims of power."

Damn, I hear you brother... it defies belief how far that idiot has fallen.

Part of me hopes Tesla is fucked and he's at least behaving this way to get favourable subsidies and tariffs on foreign competition. Otherwise he's just a deranged nut.

Digital Isle of Man: For all your connected tax haven needs?

> TBH I am not happy here. We relocated for family reasons.

Hey mate, I hope things improve. All the best.

Re: like Jersey and Guernsey – separate countries, ruled by Britain's monarch, but not...

If I remember correctly, the Swiss banks allowed your banking to remain confidential as long as there was a withholding tax applied to the interest you received. And as bank interest was / is generally pretty lame, this wasn't an issue. The IOM and Channel Island banks just shopped you to HMRC.

like Jersey and Guernsey – separate countries, ruled by Britain's monarch, but not part of the UK

Many years ago - long after closing my bank account - Barclays Jersey wrote to me telling they had informed HMRC of all my offshore earnings and transactions.

These offshore UK islands all serve the same master as the rest of us. Do business there, by all means, but don't think you're not part of the UK.

Trump wants SpaceX customer Jared Isaacman as next NASA boss

Re: He's not a politician though

They love their Fentanyl too

Andrew Tate's site ransacked, subscriber data stolen

> Odd that all three posts so far have received a downvote and yet nobody has replied with, or separately posted, a message with a contrary sentiment.

Reg downvoters are weird - and there are a lot of them. They obviously don't like certain posts (especially those pointing out Musk is a c**t, lol), but they can't articulate why.

Re: Hurrah

> Andrew Tate's followers may not be KKK members, but their desire for power, particularly over females, and 'masculinity' (whatever that may be) is very similar, and probably has similar roots in deep feelings of helplessness and personal inadequacy.

I think you raise a lot of good points. Extremists and their ability to get followers are often the symptom as well as the cause.

And hatred and blind following is easy - it really is easy, just turn your brain off and follow (us humans are really flawed in this way). It takes thought and effort to develop some critical thinking and plot your own path.

Thousands of AI agents later, who even remembers what they do?

Re: Thanks Gartner!

Yeah, it's sad. I deal with so many "senior" managers who get their thoughts from Gartner... I sit there thinking, what value do you actually provide?

Thanks Gartner!

Really good of a company that does nothing, create nothing, has zero hands on experience, to give us the benefit of their insights...

Any manager / senior exec that needs their POV should have their role questioned..

BASIC co-creator Thomas Kurtz hits END at 96

you made it easy, fun, and interesting... we salute you

Windows 95 setup was three programs in a trench coat, Microsoft vet reveals

Re: Downhill?

7 was very good, but I still think 2000 was peak Windows. I think it's because back then windows had a trajectory that suggested it was going to turn into something excellent. We had hope.

By 7 we were just glad it worked somewhat.

XP was a POS until service pack 2 or 3.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to eject hundreds more workers

Re: JPL. . .

My knowledge only extends to Nasa engineers helping SpaceX engineers get it right, for no cost. This was in the early days though, not the recent breakthroughs. .

Photoshop FOSS alternative GNU Image Manipulation Program 3.0 nearly here

Re: Ah, GIMP

LOL, I hear you. I'd love to like Gimp, but I always give up and hack the image using Mac preview (yeah, I'm that desperate).