Posts by Steve K

Behold! Humanity has captured our first look at the Sun's South Pole

I'll write it out a hundred times - sorry, sir.....

(Flashbacks to Latin class circa 1977...)

Literally "sol incognita", surely.....?

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

Re: Tesla that burned so hot, it melted part of the road

John D Clark's boook "Ignition" covers the destruction of a thick cement floor slab by chlorine difluoride spillage during rocket propellant tests (basically it is such a strong oxidiser that it causes stuff to burn that has already burned.....). That would indeed be impressive, when viewed from a suitable distance...

MIT boffins claim liquid sodium battery could one day power aircraft while sucking up CO2

Turbo boost

If the Sodium leaks from the ship then you complete your journey even quicker…

Marks & Spencer admits cybercrooks made off with customer info

This is not just a breach, it's an M&S breach...

This is not just a breach, it's an M&S breach...

Most Metaverse business projects will be dead by 2025

Spot on with that prediction!

Pretty well spot on given Meta’s non-mention of Metaverse products this week….

DARPA to 'radically' rev up mathematics research. Yes, with AI

Re: All number sequences will eventually terminate at 0

It's a bit like Reason (from Douglas Adam's DIrk Gently, not the music software named after it by Propellerhead).

Start with the answer you want and the software comes up with an impeccable route to that decision, but you aren't quite sure why. Which is why the protagonist's Bank Manager agreed to the loan for the sports car...

Re: Maths

It's Pirate Maths obviously - all the R's

Google goes cold on Europe: Stops making smart thermostats for continental conditions

Re: "Heating systems in Europe are unique"

Not sure that's fair. There are several time zones in the US of A.....

Meanwhile, in Japan, train stations are being 3D-printed in an afternoon

Bravo

Bravo for the subtitle!

There are 10,000 reasons to doubt Oracle Cloud's security breach denial

Re: Fun stuff for Bob and Jenny to do at the office.

The Cloud is not just data storage..

'Once in a lifetime' IT outage at city council hit datacenter, but no files lost

Looks like it affected their DR site too?

Looks like it affected their DR site too if they doidn't fail over to it?

(Or do they not have a DR site....?)

Stuff a Pi-hole in your router because your browser is about to betray you

Re: Running Pi-Hole as a pair

Unfortunately Gravity-Sync (a script to keep multiple Pi-holes in sync) is no longer supported with V6, which makes running >1 Pi-hole not quite as simple as it used to be.

Hopefully there will be a way to sync the settings (mainly manually-added domain blocks) before too long!

Very happy with it though - have it running on an old Model B and a Zero WH (and would use QNAP Container Station if it wasn’t such a RAM hog even with no load…)

SpaceX's 'Days Since Starship Exploded' counter made it to 48. It's back to zero again now

Re: "Blowing up Starships can’t be cheap."

Isn't it "Muskolini's Swastikars"

Satnav systems built for Earth used by Blue Ghost lander as it approached the Moon

Re: How?

From what I have read elsewhere, they are using a blast of compressed gas to persuade the loose regolith to board the PlanetVac once the attachment is flush with the surface

https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/clps/nasa-lander-to-test-vacuum-cleaner-on-moon-for-sample-collection/

Open source maintainers are really feeling the squeeze

Re: Take a tip from a…

I was going with ear hair......

UK armed forces fast-tracking cyber warriors to defend digital front lines

I bet that would go downhill rapidly

Man who binned 7,500 Bitcoin drive now wants to buy entire landfill to dig it up

Re: The real question

If he ever found anything, the only proof he would need is if the Private Key to his BitCoin Wallet allows him to access it.

The Proof would be him moving the coins to another Wallet, which (assuming you knew his BitCoin address) would be evident from the BitCoin blockchain.

Tool touted as 'first AI software engineer' is bad at its job, testers claim

Re: Is it a payment option ?

You missed out "Posting on El Reg", or was that in the 75%?

Eggheads crack the code for the perfect soft boil

Re: The puns, they hurt!

Yes, their array of boild eggs is one for the photo albumen

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

Re: Old AI concept

Or our very own AManfromMars1 AI.

For a packet of Cheesy Wotsits and some Werther's Originals once a fortnight he'll even write his own prompts.

UK tax collector's phone service 'deliberately' bad to push users online, say MPs

Re: tax rules are overly-complex?

I think it may even be an 18th Century system....

The UK tax year ends on 5th April because it used to start on 25th March (also known as one of the 4 "Quarter Days"), but in 1752 we moved from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, and 5th April is 11 days after 25th March. Then, since 1800 was NOT a leap year, it was moved to 6th April to accommodate the extra day and it has stuck there ever since.

Improved Windows Search arrives... but only for Copilot+ PCs

Re: if a user were to search for "pasta," images of lasagna might turn up

Glad to see another SteveK here!

I was feeling Canneloni

Re: if a user were to search for "pasta," images of lasagna might turn up

Hey, wait you're not a real fan - I think you're an impasta!

Copilot invades Microsoft 365 Personal and Family for an extra three bucks a month

Re: $3/month?

I tried that but that option wasn’t available to me.

Pastor's divine 'dream' crypto scheme indicted by Uncle Sam

Russell's Teapot?

It's only his word that says he had the key on that drive (and that the drive ever existed).

On an unrelated note, I am now offering fractional ownership of Russell's teapot to those who would like to invest.

The ultimate Pi 5 arrives carrying 16GB ... and a price to match

Dented Pi

Maybe £22/7

Trump China tariffs to 'overshadow' the 'progress' of AI PCs

Re: There are other countries in the world....

"There are other countries in the world...."

He's working on that....

Mitel 0-day, 5-year-old Oracle RCE bug under active exploit

New vulnerability or only if CVE-2020-2883 unpatched?

Does that mean that there is still a vulnerability in systems patched with CVE-2020-2883 or is this only on unpatched WebLogic platforms?

Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'

Re: Kicking and screaming

Completely agree and I am immensely frustrated with having to tweak W11/Edge when updates are applied (e.g. new, spurious CoPilot "features"/interference, tracking etc.).

However, isn't the flip-side to turning off the telemetry on feature usage that they don't know what is used and what isn't (assuming that feature usage information is not covered by the unskippable "basic" telemetry that you can't disable)?

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

Re: and Hyperion...

Oracle have done no significant investment in Hyperion functionality for 10+ years apart from Tech stack updates (including Essbase 21C). The thought was to push people to FCCS/EPBCS which are only now starting to become competent products for some Hyperion clients (who haven’t already jumped to OneStream/Tagetik)

They bought Hyperion/Arbor because their homegrown EPB (Enterprise Planning and Budgeting) solution was going nowhere fast and did not tempt anyone away from the Express-based OFA/OSA solutions.

Hyperion is like a Lancaster bomber - a million pieces flying in close formation (possibly less so now that the Brio stuff has been deprecated from FR) and I say that as someone who has been well-remunerated for many years for keeping Hyperion infra fed and watered….

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

Can it find the arse already in "raspberry"?

Broadcom loses another big VMware customer: UK fintech cloud Beeks Group, and most of its 20,000 VMs

Where were the changes made though?

The article didn't say whether they made changes to OpenNebula itself or whether their monitoring sits on top (e.g. via an API) as a separate suite of tools

Yup, half of that thought-leader crap on LinkedIn is indeed AI scribbled

Re: Head of Feed Relevance

Head straight for the “B” Ark, please

UK council still hadn't fully costed troubled Oracle project 2 years in

Re: “ no fully costed and resourced plan in place to enable delivery of the program to completion.”

I don't think you'd ever deliver Oracle ERP using Agile....

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

Indubitaludally

Indubitaludally

Unbreakable Voyager space probes close in on a 50 year mission

Re: Uh oh..

You can also see a much younger version of Dr. Garry Hunt interviewed by Patrick Moore on Sky At Night on iPlayer in 1986/1989 when Voyager got to Uranus and Neptune respectively.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02vkf6f

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02vkp7b

Schneider Electric ransomware crew demands $125k paid in baguettes

Re: Why did the ransomware scum demand payment in French Bread?

You're croissant a line there

Your air fryer might be snitching on you to China

Re: They want data?

I often use W12 8QT as the postcode (the old BBC TV Centre, burned into my mind from 1970's Blue Peter/Vision On competitions!!

Dave: I'm afraid I can't do that, HAL

Dave: I'm afraid I can't do that, HAL

Oregon Trail 'action comedy' film in the works from Apple

Anyone remember "Best of the West"?

Anyone remember "Best of the West"?

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

Just me then....

$180 for an overpriced, dubious SSD drive? Maybe don't join the USB Club

Almost an NFT?

You mean like a NFT?

Microsoft teases latest Windows 10 build despite looming end

Re: Timebombs?

I suspect that these "cards with details of your hardware" are part of this plan for nag-alerts to remind users that their functioning hardware running W10 isn't supported by W11 and they really should buy a new PC (bonus ponts for links included to CoPilot-ready vendors)....

Raspberry Pi AI Camera takes inferencing load off the CPU

Re: Just think for a moment about how far we've come..

The PiHut have them (or did yesterday at least....)

IBM and Oracle to support 280,000 users after winning mega ERP govt tech contract

Re: Oracle, seems I've heard that name before

Far be it from me to defend Oracle, but it wasn't Oracle's consultants who implemented the Birmingham ERP fustercluck

OpenAI in throes of executive exodus as three walk at once

Re: Valuation

Three-fiddy is the best I can do

LinkedIn started harvesting people's posts for training AI without asking for opt-in

Re: This is fine.

Can someone make sure AManFromMars leaves this switched on?

Japan to put a small red Swedish house on the Moon

Re: "a small red house on the surface of the Moon"

..or to dislodge and disable the rover the minute it lands

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

Re: Several factors come to mind...

There are amazing deals on first-generation Audi E-trons at the moment (more so on the 50 model due to the limited range). You can get a 3 or 4 year old one for well under £20k

I was tempted, but the insurance costs puts me off, and also the (potential) maintenance costs, since a £67k car still needs £67k car parts fitted when required.