Posts by retiredFool

HP stuffed a PC into a keyboard. We took it for a spin

Re: Feels like a solution in search of a problem.

Yeah, I don't see it. Laptop is cheaper, desktop is cheaper. I'd expect people to do what I used to do way back when with thumbdrives now instead of floppies. If you really want to move some stuff back and forth between office/home, setup what it is you need, and have an easy method to copy/restore what you are working on via the thumbdrive. Or gee, maybe your internet connection is fast enough in all likelihood. Again, back in the day, I used a SLIP connection to nfs mount the remote machine and s-l-o-w-l-y move stuff back and forth. Overnight for big stuff and for most stuff the drive to/from home was enough to get the source files I was working on back and forth.

Tech is now rolling out the old grievance grift

Usually means

That palantir, meta, google, xai, openai etc are the ones paying for the stories. I saw somewhere there was a "industry" advocacy group, ie paid shills, with 140mil in donations from palantir, meta, ... to advocate for palantir, meta... Cause they aren't evil, right. No, just like trump when he accuses the other guy of something just means trump is the one doing it and is trying to deflect.

I actually believe that the reg, just like /. has paid shills for these asses. Some don't believe it as they think these comment groups are small potatoes, but when you have more produce than you know what to do with, well, spread it around to even the small guys. I view it as similar to the magat movement early days when school boards were the prime target. Most people can't even tell you who is running for the board. But those boards make important decisions, like which books are in the library, ten commandments displayed at the door, ... in public school, etc. Odd to me there are books banned in schools that I read in the early 70's in high school as required reading. And I always though of that time as much more conservative than now. If I remember right, KKK was out in the open back then, hooded of course, but active enough to rent auditoriums for public events.

In some ways similar to the big sw/hw co's "giving free/discounting product to schools. I recall my EE school used DEC, and HP made an offer for free mainframes, with one condition. DEC had to go. DEC stayed, HP was shown the door.

Trump jumps from 'anything goes' to 'strict regulation' AI policy

Re: One idea Iran had

Whoa very mob like, back to the good old days for the family biz.

One idea Iran had

that I like is sewing trump's mouth shut. Ah, peace and quiet. I'm exhausted.

Hackers ate my homework: Educational SaaS Canvas down after cyberattack

Anyone remember printouts with dates

My CS classes in college usually specified that the assignment had to be done by midnight of the due date. The printout had the datestamp at the top. You'd run your deck(literally) and it would be queued to run, usually within a few minutes. When the result was printed on that old green/white 132 column paper, the date would be at the top. Professors I had did not waver on the due time.

Cloudflare to fire 1,100 staff whose jobs just aren’t AI enough

Old too. I think what has changed is back in the day, when a company was doing well, it did not sack people. Now, when a company is doing well, sacking is just biz as usual. I recall working for a defense co in the 80's and I was a couple rungs above the bottom. Reagan's defense spending started to plummet and the writing was on the wall. Contracts were being cut, and so I watched/participated in meetings where people were ranked. The boss did not tell us how many would be cut, but we knew a line would be drawn and everyone below sacked. Depressing. I left after a couple rounds, just couldn't stand to watch friends get the ax. But prior to the downturn, people had to do something really bad to get fired/let go.

QUIC will soon be as important as TCP – but it's vastly different

Re: elephant in the room (or web page)

Jevons paradox agrees with you. More efficient will just increase ads even more.

Anthropic wants Claude to play with money, unleashes finance agents

I'm sure a human will review it

Just like lawyers have been reviewing case law they submit in briefs, oh wait, no they haven't.

Royal Navy chief backs drones, autonomous weapons in ‘Hybrid Navy’

Re: distance

Yep, As Sarah Palin famously said, I can see Russia from my window. It was patently false as she didn't live on the Island, but typical Palin/politician. Liar liar pants on fire.

Re: First, decide your purpose

I agree, but unfortunately it was the southern baptists(christians) that were one of and still are the main pillars of trump's constituency. Religion easily goes off the rails. And weirdly trump never goes to church, and the baptists voted for him over people who do. I've a couple neighbors who are catholic and voted for orangey. I wonder how they feel about trump bad mouthing the pope? I imagine they accept it, because while I was chatting with one, he was telling me about how he had started reading the bible again and doing a bible study. Of the old testament. And a bit of irony, this was at a Christmas eve get together. I encouraged him to study the new one. He could use some compassion/empathy.

Re: First, decide your purpose

Yeah his 60 days was up on Iran and the first thought that pops in his mind was let's go get cuba, then greenland. Really his sanity is in question. And much like the king with no clothes, none of his subjects are telling him the truth. Stop just stop. History is not going to judge trump's enablers well, and worse for them, trump is old, fat, and likely to die from choking on McD fish sandwiches long before marco or hegs or pirro or ... Something the young might want to think about.

Re: As if there's a choice!

Problem is, who is going to build them? Import from China? US is in the same situation. We (US) has become great at jawboning and spending huge sums discussing new bestest ways to do things. To implement our grand ideas, we outsource to a country that can build it and build it cheap. Because all the profit has to go for jawboning.

Bot her emails: most modern phishing campaigns are AI-enabled

Perhaps AI

will be the thing that pushes email into signed messages or some other drastic change. I'd even be good with charging senders 1/2c for each email, me included. If postage in the US will be a buck in no time, charging 1/2c doesn't seem like a budget buster if it can clean up email. Imagine how much society would save if instead of 99% spam-phish/1% valid becomes 99% valid/1%spam-phish. And I'm even ok with the ISP getting the money if it eliminated 90% of the spam. Or maybe do a split, ISP be 1/4c and receiver gets 1/4c. Until it costs money to send poo, the poo will be to the rafters.

Cursor-Opus agent snuffs out startup’s production database

Re: Hard to blame Railway here

What boggles me is quotes like

"Nonetheless, Crane said, he's still extremely bullish on AI and AI coding agents"

So the thing all but killed your co and you are bullish on it. To me its like all the stories I see on self drive. A guy in austin had a video of him sitting in his tesla at a RR crossing, gates down. I guess his mind wanders or whatever, but the car decides to move on thru the down crossing gates. He somehow notices, and does nothing as the train almost kills him as the car clears the gates. He is still using self drive. Another story about some editor was on I think cnbc's web site and the guy is cautious about tesla self drive. Nevertheless he activates it with a passenger and they are laughing as the thing is doing things that very close to crash the car multiple times or collide with another vehicle. Yet another example has been some heavy rains in austin the past few days have caused some street flooding. They drill into people turn around don't drown. The waymo's are plodding thru and stopping in the water. Fortunately not rushing water or there would be some dead bodies. And what does one do if one is trapped in a waymo that proceeds into a flooded area? Do the windows work? Are they big enough to squeeze thru? Because I thought the doors were locked. News has also reported multiple incidents now where waymo's are interfering with emergency vehicles. The usual blocking the street when the ambulance tries to get thru, because well, what should you do when you hear sirens? Of course I'll stop where I am and block traffic. Or another video showed one straddling a fire hose. Brilliant. Cut off the water flow to the guy fighting a fire. And the city can't do jack because the state lawmakers were paid handsomely with probably hookers and blow to force cities to allow waymo.

And lastly, I don't know why yet, but I am thinking the young singer who crashed and died in his 2026 tesla in North Carolina a few nights ago was probably tired at 2am and turned on self drive. Unfortunately either he or the car drove the thing off the road and into a fence pole. I think tox screen has come back and he wasn't drinking. So that leaves me to believe tesla has refused to turn over the logs and so we may never know if self drive killed the kid.

So back to Crane, why do some people just seem to not learn? How many times do you have to sear your hand on a hot stove before you stop putting your hand on it? AI screwed Crane, and yet fully embraces it. As they say, you can't fix stupid.

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: decimal system

"we are a scientifically literate species", not in merica!

Microsoft releases first big update after Nadella's vow to 'win back fans'

Re: Too little, too late

Someone should burn this statement into the door of every O/S writer in the world.

"My computer operating system is just a nondescript part of the tool I use for HOURS every single day, again. It just makes things work, and gets out of my way. "

The O/S should be out of the way of the applications that you actually want to run/use. I don't muck with my house's slab foundation either. It is just there.

Pro-Iran crew turns DDoS into shakedown as Ubuntu.com stays down

or microsoft? Or oracle, or ??? Ubuntu what are they thinking. My only thought is ubuntu is big, but not so big that they can do a successful attack.

Nearly half of UK businesses pwned last year as phishing keeps doing the job like it's 2005

Re: Go back to text based email

Alpine makes it easy to do. You tab thru the links, hit return on the one you want, alpine displays the full link and what browser you want to launch the link with. Another return starts the browser with link. One thing I might suggest is to actually bounce emails with shortened links. I view opening a link as opening a package that could have a bomb in it. If the link is shortened, you've no idea where it goes. And really if you are a large multi-site co, I might suggest worse than a bomb. A bomb would only destroy one site. An infection could take out the whole co.

If someone you did not know gave you a package to carry on a plane would you? If someone outside the building gave you a package to take to a coworker, would you? I don't think employees are really trained as to the seriousness of the issue. There was a time when people were fired for simply browsing the net at work. A guy I worked with got can'ed in the 90's for just that.

Go back to text based email

would likely solve much of it. Make some friction to clicking a link. And one help to that is you see the link goes to pornme.com instead bankname.com. Also force the text based email client to show full headers by default. Seeing the email originated from .kr domain is an easy clue. I use alpine, it is laughable some of the phishing attempts I've seen. A few are quite well structured text and could maybe trick me, but that domain source is a dead giveaway. I never even get to the stage of look at the link. Now conversely, I've had a few legitimate emails that I think thrice before clicking the link. I have even called a few to verify as the link does not look all that sanitary. Call me crazy, but in decades, never been porned.

Phone users know when to hold ’em, delay upgrades amid inflation

No plan on upgrading

But the article implies that memory will be in short supply until 2029. Me thinks the AI shall burst in 2027 and memory will be plentiful with more supply and nowhere to put it.

AWS says acute server memory shortage is driving customers to the cloud

Re: Why duz I haev memory problem?

Needs more acronyms.

GoDaddy customer claims registrar transferred 27-year-old domain without any security checks

Re: Bookmarked

She is a friend I've met thru others. I have other quirky non-techy friends, just my personality. Keeps life interesting. But when I say ditz, she is the quintessential blond ditz. The Godaddy story isn't even the best. She had tax problems, a house that she bought(new) that couldn't get an occupancy certificate, ... It was always something. Drama always. Me I am pretty boring. I think I gravitate to knowing quirky as there is a line from I think one of EM Forester's novels that goes something like "Nothing interesting happens to me...". He is suggesting he observes instead of participates in life.

Re: Well what did you expect from GoDaddy?

Have an upvote, I'd give you 2 if I could. Comment was Funny AND Insightful.

Re: Bookmarked

To say I was surprised really doesn't capture it. What I expected to happen was the agent to apologize profusely to my friend, and tell her to call back when she had some evidence she was the owner of the account. My friend is a ditz, so I get it, but if I walk into a bank and request access to the account of John Smith, I'd expect the bank to ask for id. And when I say I don't have any and pretty please I really need to access the account, I'd expect the bank would show me the door. My friend should have been shown the door.

Years ago

A woman non-nerdy friend of mine had a web site someone else had setup for her. I was having dinner at her house with a few people. She said something about wanting to update something simple on the website and I said I'd help if I could. She'd lost the password, so called go daddy. A helpful agent asked her for several pieces of info, of which she knew none. Zero, zip. Five minutes later she has a password. I could not believe it. She did not even know the CC# that was paying for the account and they still gave her access. I did not use godaddy myself and swore to myself I NEVER would. Sounds like they may have gotten even worse from their abysmal security. I did not think possible, and yet here we are.

Oracle plans to power its New Mexico mega datacenter with a 2.45GW fuel cell farm

It would be a happy day if Larry goes bust

Over all these data center investments. A happy day indeed.

Despite proposed science cuts, NASA boss says 'We haven't canceled anything yet'

Re: Disturbing statement

Ah border collie's, the genius of the dog breed. My hound is as dumb as a rock. I expect the congress critters are more like my hound. He eats deer poop and they eat trump shit.

Disturbing statement

"down to $3.9 billion. To put those figures in context, the first week of the US's war against Iran cost well over $10 billion"

So one week of a illegal war gets more cash than a year of science. Really? And I guess we can just outsource education to the church to save some bucks for some more bombs too.

Locked, stocked, and losing budget: AI vendor lock-in bites back

Re: Good news

Unfortunately, even if the CEO gets the AX, it is a golden AX worth millions/billions. Certainly large enough to live comfortably for the rest of their life, or start another co and do it all over again. The tens/hundreds of thousands of minions have gotten the don't let the door hit you on the butt on the way out to pay for the AI/golden parachute.

Friendster rises from the grave to make social media great again

Re: if it sounds too good to be true

I'm a bit dubious of his intentions. His primary source of revenue sounds like domain name reselling. And using parked domains to throw ads up to people who typo or use a domain that went out of biz and picked it up on the cheap. Both fall on the scam side of my scales.

Meta to power its bit barns with energy from space

Re: An impractical plan to bamboozle naive investors

I've seen a couple examples where solar actually helps ag. Shade. Sheep liked it and I thought I saw cows grazing the area as well. It might even help the grass as full scorching sun all day long may be too much. The video I saw gave a row of panels about a row and a half of open space and then another row of panels. The panels were high enough off the ground for the sheep to go under.

Pentagon wants to water down drone program with autonomous subs

Re: Well....

I believe you are correct. I've seen multiple stories about Ukraine producing its own weapons, from bullets to drones. Necessity. The drone thing could be there best option. As another poster mentioned about the UK in WWII running out of manpower, Ukraine too is running out of soldiers. Necessity may end up building a wall of guns that shoots to kill anything that comes in the land based drone sights and the drones just roll slowly to the Ukraine/Russian border.

Re: Well....

Just saw an article where Ukraine is now using land based drones, sort of like that quirky comedy Short circuit Johnny 5, except these have guns and shoot. Apparently in quantity as they are being used to hold off Russian soldiers. The Ukraine minister's quote was "Drone's don't bleed".The article went on to talk about how Ukraine is forging agreements with ME countries to supply anti-drone technologies in exchange for missiles.

Re: Well....

I was going to say the same thing. Ukraine has functional ones, they'd probably even sell them to the US. I've read Ukraine has started to develop major capabilities for arms production. Necessity, mother of invention.

Burglar alarm biz burgled: ADT confirms cyber intrusion after ShinyHunters extortion attempt

Not sure who the criminal is

ADT pricing is extortion. Had them for years, and discovered just how much cheaper some alternatives are. With better service.

It's a myth that you need Mythos to find bugs: Open source models can do it just as well

This caught my eye

"someone's got to use services that pay for all those GPUs and datacenters –will act as a forcing function that makes infosec teams adopt AI and as a result improve their proactive and defensive work."

Now I suspect elreg threw in the line and was not a quote, still the idea that because you have gpu's you must use them is just not true. There are many examples of failed co's that thought they had created the best thing since sliced bread only to discover no one wanted it/wasn't useful, and the co subsequently went bk taking the investors to zip.

Ubuntu Resolute Raccoon spits out Xorg, but still lets you run X11 apps

Re: advanced hardcore power user here (not)

For me its no X, no thanks.

Microsoft gives your Word documents an AI co-author you didn’t ask for

Re: emphasizing visibility and control

As others point out, with microsoft o/s, it is not your computer, it is their computer. Bend over.

American farms have a new steward for their safety net, disaster programs... Palantir

Re: Vocabulary

Trump's not stupid, it is why he is pouring billions to the farms. They voted for him, and may not vote for his choir in Nov, which will result in a massive defang of trump. Massive, like go to jail massive. Several of the MAGA faithful have broken ranks, more will. Iran hasn't even begun to bite a US person. Look at the markets, it is almost like nothing is happening.

Musk bets Tesla's AI future on Intel node that isn't finished yet

I imagine prior to the Intel announcement from tesla, musk & friends bought Intel stock in a big way, made the announcement, knew it would pump Intel (and it did) and then sell. Profit.

Typical musk

Numbers aren't good, so "look over there" approach. Tomorrow we will have a mega giga tera thing that generates quadrillions in returns.

Anthropic tests how devs react to yanking Claude Code from Pro plan

Re: Surprise!

Times have definitely changed. The startup I was in during the early 90's was stoked when they got I think 1mil. Like over the moon. Now a mil doesn't even get snacks. Now it takes at least a bil, and often 10b. Which is pretty strange when you think inflation in the past 30 years has not been 1000%. More like 100%.

Re: Surprise!

Maybe not anymore. I had a neighbor in an apt complex I lived in right out of school. He was offering me coke all the time, no charge, something I never took him up on. I later discovered he was a drug dealer, which really did not surprise me. I was always very uncomfortable around him and was pretty happy to move.

Iran claims US used backdoors to knock out networking equipment during war

It was an illegal attack by the us, not a war. Plain and simple. And I'd like to see everyone involved from el trumpie to kushner to hegs to marco charged with war crimes and have them spend the rest of their lives in prison for it. It is no different than what russia did to ukraine.

Re: All backdoors eventually get leaked..

Years back, a friend who does litho told me DARPA had been sending out feelers for how to verify a chip was what you thought it was. Because of that very reason. I remember thinking at the time that is crazy and a very poor way to ensure both that your design doesn't leak to a foreign entity and that your design isn't modified by a foreign entity.

Buy Euro

to ensure neither US or China back doors. Come on EU, make some enterprise routers.

Magnificent irony as Meta staff unhappy about running surveillance software on work PCs

I imagine the C-suite minimizes computer usage. You know the equivalent of a paper trail is a bad thing in court. Verbal conversations that are not recorded are so much easier to dispute. Look at the most recent Patel allegations. Drunk fbi director with no paper trail to prove he was in the office. But then lack of a trail doesn't prove he wasn't there.

Re: It's all a bit shit really...

I expect what is really going on is hoovering up the data to set the max price based on individual. JetBlue is being investigated. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/lawmakers-question-if-jetblue-is-using-personal-data-set-ticket-prices-2026-04-21/ Nirvana for corp's is to be able to squeeze the customer for the absolute maximum on an individual basis. And somehow convince the mark they got the best deal of everyone.

Yet another ex-ransomware negotiator admits turning rogue after payoff from crimelords

20 years seems way too light

I've always felt when a perp pulls off a stunt that is in the millions, basically a lifetime of income for most, the perp committed the equivalent of murder and should be sentenced appropriately.

Trump-branded datacenter project fails to make itself great, again

Sounds crazy can't find a tenant

In the current state of affairs, I'd think customers would be banging on the doors for a slot. It must be bad, like bat shit bad for them not to be able to find a dozen customers. First hint is a "conservative" at war with fellow conservatives. Thiel and the others listed are not to be pissed off and this guy has managed to piss them all off. Doomed.