Posts by Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

Microsoft sharpens the blocking axe for Exchange Web Services

I gave Microsoft the axe after my latest Windows 11 installation lasted a whole two weeks before something nuked every partition table in the machine. With that kind of code "quality", who needs 'em? Steam Proton Experimental now runs more games than a fully patched Windows 11 box does! Even Microsoft isn't Microshit-compatible any more.

Latest Windows 11 updates may break the OS's most basic bits

Fire up Steam. Select game. Click "Install." Wait a few hours. Click "Play" and wait for the Vulkan shaders to be processed. Click through the setup of the loader, logging in once across all your games from EA.

Enjoy.

I did have to use protondb to find instructions on disabling the in-game features of the launcher for Jedi: Fallen Order or it wouldn't run, but that was the only "tweaking" I had to do across my entire catalogue of EA games. At least the ones they didn't decommission the servers for...

They also leave you vulnerable to attacks even if you're fully up to date. See last windows 11 install I ran three weeks ago that lasted a whole two weeks before something nuked my partition tables on all my drives.

On reinstalling Linux, I discovered a miracle: Electronic Arts has released a Linux Proton compatible loader so now ALL my games run on Linux except one whose servers have been decommissioned. Even windows 11 can't claim that any more.

Lawyer's 6-year-old son uses AI to build copyright infringement generator

Repeat this until you get it through your head:

The so-called "AI" tools are ALL built by stealing copyrighted and private information left, right, and center from across the entire internet, with no moral, religious, logical, or legal justification for the mass theft of IP. The whole concept of statistics driven "AI" is FOUNDED on the idea of stealing ALL data with NO RESPECT for boundaries.

Micron ditches consumer memory brand Crucial to chase AI riches

Good thing I'm not planning on building another machine any time soon, because I've used nothing but "Crucial" memory for roughly 20 years...

The Steam Machine rises again as Valve readies 2026 hardware trifecta

Re: Wish they were more honest about what it can and cannot do

I thought they had such a deal in place with EA until today, when I discovered that some time over the past month or so, EA has released a Steam Linux version of their loader application which runs just fine with Proton Experimental on Debian 13 with the NVidia 580 drivers installed from the Debian 12 repos. (I'd rather that than installing a .bin driver which isn't managed by the OS.)

I have Star Wars: Battlefront II and Star Wars: Jedi - Fallen Order installed and play tested as of today on this box.

There are now no games that I can't install and run that I know of in my game catalog; the EA games were the last hold outs.

Even Windows 11 with the latest patches can't run everything Proton can. If you have an older game, you often have to force it to run under Proton 9 because the Proton Experimental video driver stack is too new for those games, but they run.

Compare that to Windows 11 Pro, which as of the last installation with the lastest and greatest 24H2 patches installed would not run Hitman 2, Remember Me, Serious Sam 4, or XCOM: Enemy Unknown any more. Those games ran under Windows 11 pro prior to 24H2. Even Microsquishy isn't as Windows Compatible as Steam Proton any more!

Not only does Steam Proton for Linux run around 90% of games, I've discovered that there are three or four of my older games that run fine on Proton but won't run on Windows 11 Pro with the latest patches installed. Granted they aren't newer games, but still, compatibility clearly is not the goal it once was at Microsoft, so eventually I expect I'll have to have a dual-boot machine to play all my games just because both stacks are fubar'd.

Whatever legitimate places AI has, inside an OS ain't one

I ran Windows 11 Pro for years without an issue until recently. But the last Windows 11 Pro installation I did only survived two weeks before getting nuked by an attack, clobbering the partition tables of every single drive in my system, mounted or not. I lost some data this time, but it wasn't critical data - I hadn't even accessed it for actual use in two years! I'm just a pack-rat collector and was loath to free up the space, even though it was technically wasted space.

All my application data, program code, etc. was safely backed up, give or take a week or work and debugging. But the critical pieces of that work were in the backups, and most of the bugs were fixed before they were encountered again because they were all exactly the same single dumb mistake repeated from a code template with an error.

So I'm back on Debian 13, albeit with Debian 12 repos referenced for the video driver and CUDA stack. Although NVidia has a full CUDA stack repo for Debian 13, the key it uses is incompatible with any repository serving up the 580 version of the NVidia drivers, which enable DLSS under Steam Proton Experimental on Linux. I didn't want the Debian 13 CUDA stack relying on a driver installed via .bin file because the CUDA stack is closely tied to the display driver version and there was a good chance of ending up with an unbootable system with errors that I don't know how to recover from via command line without a functioning system to use for reading the documentation. Catch-22 if I let that happen, so I did what I could to get rid of the .bin driver without losing 580 for my games.

The resulting system is less stable than the .bin driver install had been, but that could be due to CUDA 13.0 installed on the box. Dot-0 releases are notorious for having issues, and I'm sure there will be a lot of patches and fixes in 13.1 soon enough.

Microsoft's code quality has gone to shit. There is no way a rogue program should be able to nuke partition tables unless Windows itself has been compromised, and with all their blather about TPM keys and everything to prevent just that kind of thing from happening, all I can say is: I'm not impressed. Linux has been, continues to be, and will for the foreseeable future be easier to maintain, patch, and keep up to date without getting nuked by rogue programs.

Go back to the drawing board, Satya. The only ones who want this "Artificial Ignorance" crap you're pushing is your marketing department and your stock-pumping "investment" arm.

KDE Plasma sets date to dump X11 as Wayland push accelerates

You will pry X-11 remote access protocols and NVidia driver acceleration and full CUDA support from my cold, dead fingers. Any Desktop that won't support my gaming stack no longer exists for me...

Canadian data order risks blowing a hole in EU sovereignty

If you have a subsidiary in a nation it is subject to that nation's legal system first and foremost. Being a foreign owned business does not escape liability. There's no need to go through treaties for the request because the request is being made of a legally-Canadian business.

Trump wants to turn it on again with 'Genesis Mission' for AI in science

Re: But of course

I'm still baffled at how some people think "1984" is a guide not a warning!

Re: Trump IQ versus AI IQ?

Well, let's just say Drumpf's IQ is clearly in the neighbourhood of his waist size in inches. He speaks in 4-6 letter words, talks utter and complete nonsense over half the time, and is clearly deeply and inevitably in the declining years of dementia - severe dementia. Only such a feeble intellect would even suggest trying to treat so many myriad technologies and missions as a single entity.

Inevitably, those who insist on asking "How hard can it be?" are the ones who have the least knowledge about the subjects at hand.

Bossware booms as bots determine whether you're doing a good job

Re: Auto-micromanagement

Good management exists at small companies where the owners are the only management that matters, and they do "crazy" things like set up LAN parties in the evenings, or are more generous with Christmas bonuses and gifts than anyone would expect after reading how shabbily the big corps treat people online. There are nice places to work, and I had the pleasure of working at several of them.

The problems start when the shares go public and the demand for "instant profit" takes precedence over treating people like HUMAN BEINGS.

Re: a1 == slavery

If you are trapped in a job by financial considerations that prevent you from quitting on the spot, it most definitely is slavery, and it is rampant in the industry. Thank the Universe I'm retired and don't have to put up with the latest crop of workplace insanity - I'd be flipping my manager "The Bird" the first time they told me I "need" to install monitoring tools on my hardware to work a contract. Screw that happy horseshit - I'm a professional, not your wage slave!

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

Re: Reality is an illusion ...

What money? It's only a dream of money, a stock market bubble soon to burst, taking down the American empire with it as it combines with Drumpf's largesse to the uber-rich forcing the USA into the inevitable bankruptcy that Der Pumpkin Fuhrer is so good at declaring, courtesy of his boss, Putin the Butcher.

Lawsuit seeks to probe Uncle Sam's role in ICE-tracking app takedowns

ICE "agents" are at risk because everybody knows they're Drumpf's take on the racist brownshirts of Nazi Germany whose job it was to round up the Jews and foreigners for shipping to the internment camps.

Sound familiar?

Ignite awash with agents as Microsoft triples down on AI

Turns out to be a non-issue, because it took less than two weeks for my Windows system to be hacked irreperably. Even lost some data this time because one of my external backup drives failed.

Ah well, the more irritating part is losing a week's work, but that's my fault for not spinning off my end of day backups to external storage. My bad.

I figure my constant berating and lambasting of Der Pumpkin Fuhrer ticked off some MAGAts with above-average skills at the keyboard. I think I'll step up the rhetoric and hyperbole - the Nazi States of America is going to pay for wasting my time one way or another. I just don't know exactly how yet. Perhaps just by being sure to sell what I'm working on to the Europeans or Chinese instead of an American conglomerate...

I'm watching for Microsquishy to overstep their bounds. Certainly they don't cease with pushing their AI-for-pay services, with things like GitHub Co-pilot constantly pushed as a "migration" from Intellicode in VSCode. Screw that. I tried the LLM approach; it takes me longer to produce quality code with an LLM screwing things up I didn't tell it to touch than it does to just do the damned work myself!

Trump, Republicans try again to stop states from regulating AI

Sieg Heil, Mein Fuhrer!

Ve Shall Not Restrict Thine Fascist Corporate Cronies In Any Way, Eh?

Full steam ahead on raping the population of the world! After all, it's what you do best other than declaring bankruptcy!

Canada ups its European Space Agency bet 10x with $376M

Drumpf utterly destroyed the relationship Canada had with the US. In case you hadn't noticed, our Prime Minister, Mark Carney, has signed off on several international deals to diversify our trade and defense portfolios.

Here's hoping we completely cancel the albatross F-35's with their obscene price tags and buy the Saab Grippen instead - they're willing to work with Canada to build up our own maintenance and repair facilities, and do a large part of the manufacturing here.

Drumpf's F-35 deal is all about the US raping anyone stupid enough to buy those pieces of shit.

Pentagon and soldiers let too many secrets slip on social networks, watchdog says

Hey, c'mon, they're just emulating the bozo Drumpf chose to run the military. You know, the guy who invited a reporter to a secure meeting?

Microsoft's first Windows 10 ESU Patch Tuesday release fails for some

Microsoft is the "Swedish Chef" {Muppet) of the industry. Every day it's "Bork! Bork! Bork!"

Google pitches EU on adtech fixes to dodge breakup after €2.95B slap

That's just standard American policy - ignore the crap out of EU law and then delay payment of the penalties for 15-20 years by "appealing" what they know damned well are valid charges.

Software engineer reveals the dirty little secret about AI coding assistants: They don't save much time

Re: The student becomes the master.

Agreed - especially not LLM technology, which isn't actually "intelligent" so that it understands your request as anything but a statistical theory against a massive dataset. Never mind technology that can understand an application in it's entirety like a programmer has to while debugging a major system. LLMs are fine for toy projects of a few files, but try to take them up against a code base of hundreds of thousands or millions of lines and they fail miserably at "understanding" what needs to change using mere statistics.

We need actual machine intelligence with model-of-the-world storage, information about the history of a conversation and project over time, less tendency to modify code that isn't related to a problem, and the ability to correlate the model of the world with templates of how to map it to system concepts. LLM statistics will never achieve that, and Altman and company are the biggest scam artists and bullshit spewers on the planet since Drumpf was born...

AMD grabs more x86 share as Intel stumbles in entry-level chips

Why would anybody buy Intel? AMD outperforms them, dollar for dollar, with lower power and cooling requirements.

Face it: Intel is dead in the water. They're living the same way IBM did thirty years ago: because of the "reputation" that "nobody ever got fired for buying Intel."

Utter nonsense; I'd TURF any purchasing agent who opted for Intel with my hard won dollars.

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

Re: He is so right

My favourite quote was "... the operating system feels like a sales channel for all their other properties." Bang on. Dead bang on.

I came back after a break to find the OS had "helpfully" started Edge to display an "Install YouTube?" page.

No I do NOT want to )%&@$)%% install YouTube, and I don't want god damned Edge running on my system - EVER!

Foxconn hires humanoid robots to make servers at Nvidia's Texas factory

To be fair, everything in a computer has been made by robotics assembly for decades except the final slotting of the daughter boards in the motherboard in the case, whether it be a server case or personal sized computer. Surface mount technology has been far too small for human assembly since the 80s...

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

*LOLOLOLOL* Microsoft "quality control" has been a joke in the industry since day one! Their first C compiler for the Amiga didn't even handle pointers properly! THAT kind of nonsense has always been their "reputation."

Researchers want to kill the vibe, propose better model for AI coding

So they've relabeled structured/object-oriented ideas "Concepts", and as per usual when these "bright ideas" come out, it's absolutely NOTHING new under the hood.

Musk gets approval for bumper Tesla payout but, unlike his robot, there are strings attached

Seeing as they're more interested in kissing the Muscoid's arse than paying shareholders, I'd be dumping my stock REAL QUICK if I had any...

Google’s Ironwood TPUs represent a bigger threat than Nvidia would have you believe

It generates porn for teenagers with extra large breasts... *LOL*

It would seem that the Americans are in a three way race for dominance, with IBM and Intel already knocked out of the running.

Amazon Web Services’ US-EAST-1 region in trouble again, with EC2 and container services impacted

Re: A glorified chaos machine :o

Wonderful piece of prose; kudos - I think it's worthy of comparison to Terry Pratchett!

"The Cloud" is just somebody else's computer that you pay an outrageous set of fees to use.

But "The Cloud" computer is managed by human beings in the end, and controlled by largely human-written software (which typically puts so called "vibe" code to shame for quality and reliability in reality), and mistakes will happen.

But when "The Cloud" makes a mistake, it makes it for thousands and tens of thousands of systems. Not just one corporate server cluster.

After seeing my bill on trial runs of cloud services, I rapidly realized I could buy self-hosting hardware for about 4-5 months of cloud services if I had a real workload. I didn't buy self-hosting hardware, but it convinced me that self-hosting or co-location typically put "The Cloud" to shame for price, even when you factored in some decent number of sysadmins (you need sysadmins for the hosts you run, not the Amazon EC service configurations, but that's "six of one; half a dozen of the other.")

Two-fifths of SAP Americas users yet to ditch legacy ERP

I don't see why anybody should be in a rush to shift over to paying monthly fees for a service when they have perfectly functional systems on site that don't require additional payments.

Azure stumbles in Western Europe, Microsoft blames 'thermal event'

If course it was a "thermal event" in that Microsoft products are steaming piles of crap! ;)

When Debian won't do, Devuan 6 'Excalibur' Linux makes the grade

What's so terrible about systemd? So it's this big, sprawling, kitchen sink that is inhaling everything useful the system used to do in favour of "hidden" code maintained by RedHat, but is that really a bad thing? The worst that happens is that it utterly and completely destroys your system because it "felt like it" after RedHat/IBM injects their "AI" services. :)

Tesla board wants to grant Musk $1T in stock, Norway wealth fund says nope

What exactly does that useless sack of shit do except illegally pump stocks?

Uncle Sam wants to scan your iris and collect your DNA, citizen or not

Simple solution. Under no circumstances should you travel to or through the Fascist States of America...

IBM cutting several thousand jobs in latest layoffs

IBM - Idiots, Boneheads, and Morons.

ESA tests bacterial powder to feed Moon and Mars crews

Probably tastier than Mickie D's! :)

Google yanks Gemma after US senator says model ‘hallucinated’ her committing crimes

Considering that the Republicans are thoroughly delusional about the separation of powers in the US government, I think it's only fair that the world lobbed a few good hallucinations back at them!

Debian demands Rust or rust in peace for legacy ports

And nobody shed a tear except people running systems so old and so slow that they're outperformed by the cheapest modern cellphones by several orders of magnitude...

OpenAI spreads the imaginary wealth beyond Microsoft with $38B AWS deal

It's easy to spend somebody else's money when you live in fantasy land like the "all things AI" crowd does.

AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay

Don't care; they need me and my experience with the company to save them, not Joe Schmoe off the street. That experience is gonna cost 'em, and that is how it is going to be explained.

As the old adage goes "the bill is for knowing where and how hard to hit it..." :)

Screw that. If I'd been laid off to give AI a role, I'd be demanding a fat salary increase to save their bacon after being treated like shit.

OpenAI tells Trump to build more power plants or China wins the AI arms race

Re: OpenAI panhandling

Agreed 125%!

Re: China has already won

Yep, but the Americans don't want to accept the fact.

This should be interesting. The only thing I can see working is a "69" position, because it seems to me that Drumpf and the Republican Party are every bit as greedy as OpenAI's management and shareholders.

What they're really saying is "the government should spend tax dollars on AI-specific power generation requirements rather than giving us an outright grant to build the power we need because it's 'bad optics' after Drumpf's largesse to the Uber-rich in the budget."

Google says reports of a Gmail breach have been greatly exaggerated

I'll simply point out that every single one of those "major news sources" has a bone to pick with Google for "stealing" their advertising revenue and subscription eyeballs and wallets. No bias there... or reason to inflame a minor "situation" as if it were the end of the world (at least to typical users in the public sphere.)