Posts by Joe Gurman

District denies enrollment to child based on license plate reader data

He’s also meant to have written….

“Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.”

Flying cabs, next-gen aircraft cleared for takeoff in 26 states

Re: Taxi!

I believe that was covered pretty well in The Fifth Element.

Bootleg Windows, Office scheme crashes, triggers 22-month lockup for Florida woman

Providence? That’s in Rhode Island.

I think your autocorrect is unfamiliar with “provenance.”

AI models suck slightly less at math than they did last year

The experience

…. will be priceless.

Say goodbye to budget PCs and smartphones – memory is too expensive now

Re: Have an upvote

Didn’t know you could use CEOs for that.

GCHQ dangles up to £130K for a CISO to fight the world's most capable adversaries

Re: who can it be?

Good demonstration of basic skills, right?

Hubble in a death spiral that could end as early as 2028 without a reboost

Let her go down

Time to build a new uv/optical “great observatory.”

'Merica-made Mac Minis marked for manufacturing

Re: Tech's Ass

Believe you just proved you don’t look at Apple hardware. Apple has, to my knowledge, never put a sticker on anything they manufactured. That kind of labelling is laser-etched onto the exterior. Stickers, if any, go on the post-consumer boxes, presumably right over the “Designed in California. Manufactured in {wherever}” legend — printed in plant-based ink, of course.

Re: Tech's Ass

I suspect a small number of production engineers will be overseeing the robots that assemble the minis. Very good chance the only unskilled labor will be the folks lifting the boxes onto pallets the skilled forklift operators will then load onto trucks.

Re: Its most affordable Macintosh

I suspect the total unit assembly cost (not counting the amortization of the assembly line installation in an existing hardware production facility) will be under US$10.

Re: Welp

No, the building already exists and most of it is dedicated to building Apple’s in-house AI servers.

Firefox 148 adds master switch for browser bot bother

Firefox has been dead for me….

….since Waterfox was released.

AMD challenges Intel with an 84-core Epyc processor aimed at telcos, edge

I guess….

….they’re spelling “Saronno” wrong to avoid legal action from a certain purveyor of Amaretto.

Microsoft execs worry AI will eat entry level coding jobs

Re: Subs!

Second paragraph: “while imposing an AI drag on early-in-career (EiC) developers”.

Re: Assuming the sentiment is genuine

Señor Fawlty-Code?

Work experience kids messed with manager's PC to send him to Ctrl-Alt-Del hell

Re: Helpdesk? Helpdesk?

But it’s still pronounced “helldesk” if you work there.

You can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone, says Dutch defense chief

I'll believe that this blowhard....

....can "jailbreak" an F-35 as soon as he shows me he cn jailbreak my iPhone from the other side of an ocean. Not brick, but fully jailbreak, and demonstare by inserting his own code.

DOGE bites taxman

The assignment....

....of a thousand IRS IT people to deal with the tax filing season is primarily motivated by the large number of people wanting to see their refunds pronto, as they used to say in western movies. For the last decade or more, people with normal incomes filing electronically have seen their refunds in 3 - 4 weeks. Naturally, we've all been spoiled by that. For the people still filing on paper.... vaya con Dios.

UK to demand social platforms take down abusive intimate images within 48 hours

Re: Why not, why not, why not...

Why is 48 hours reasonable? If the complainant's ID is verified, why indeed should it not be instant?

Your AI-generated password isn't random, it just looks that way

They should be generating > 34 character passphrases....

....all beginning with "CorrectHorse."

6,000 execs struggle to find the AI productivity boom

Re: Next up...

I don't mean to be rude, but what planet are you living on? Tens of thousands of people have been let go because their corporate overlords preferred to micturate away their cash on hand on AI "data" center builds to spending it on, you know, human employees and their benefits packages. An economic shift so far proven good only for a very small number of GPU chip makers, memory purveyors, and the fossil fuel extraction industry.

Re: Next up...

Exactly.

Perhaps they'd understand if someone wearing a mock turtleneck in a slop-video told them they were holding it wrong.

Amazon's $200 billion capex plan: How I learned to stop worrying and love negative free cash flow

….or at the mercy of the supply chain

At my age, I may never see DRAM prices come down again.

Linus Torvalds and friends tell The Reg how Linux solo act became a global jam session

Maybe that….

….was when you became aware of Silicon Valley as an incubator of tech startups with the assistance of venture capital, but that really started with the HP garage and Stanford engineering dean Frederick Terman’s recruiting of VC in 1951.

By tech outfit standards, it was pretty long in the tooth by the mid-1990s.

Final step to put new website into production deleted it instead

Re: Ah, the old "rm -rf *" command

Did you beat the manslaughter rap, or are you writing from one of HM prisons?

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

Re: Feed your AI Finnegans Wake

….or anything by e e cummings.

The big FOSS vendors don't eat their own dogfood – they pay for proprietary groupware

Something....

....something, something, something about dogfood, something, something.

Apple's Creator Studio creates a subscription where free apps used to live

Um….

….I installed the “15” versions on my Mac last week (they appeared automagically on my iThings after an OS patch. I’ve gotten exactly one “Subscribe” pop-up since (and I’ve used all three apps). Is this article panicking much, or is this just the normal slag Apple reflex showing?

Reviving a CIDCO MailStation – the last Z80 computer

The original Mac 128K….

….display was 512 x 342.

Taiwan tells Uncle Sam its chip ecosystem ain't going anywhere

Interesting way of listing TSMC customers….

Omitting, as it dies, their number 2 customer (and until very recently, number 1), Apple.

Microsoft spends billions on AI, converts just 3.3% of Copilot Chat users

Nice to see that the market....

....was not amused by the mismatch of all that AI spending and such minimal adoption (shares off 10% since the day after the earnings call).

Systemd daddy quits Microsoft to prove Linux can be trusted

“The” other?

*cough*

Claude Code's prying AIs read off-limits secret files

The only way to win….

…. is not to play.

France to replace US videoconferencing wares with unfortunately named sovereign alternative

And….

….the identically pronounced Vizio has the distinction of being the only manufacturer of TVs to have been fined by the US Federal Trade Commission for watching its customers, well watching what they were watching, without their permission (in 2015). The outfit is now owned by Walmart, who would never ever do anything like that.

Succession: Linux kernel community gets continuity plan for post-Linus era

Probably good to have some plans….

….but oftentimes, they break when actually applied. Cf. The Death of Stalin.

Headset hype meets harsh reality as Apple and Meta VR shipments fizzle in 2025

Re: The Next Big Thing

It’s never to early to adopt a technology that will get you ounched in the face — with the device on your face.

Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

Durn kids

Get off my lawn, and take your 64-bit word size and your GUIs and your hi-def monitors and your inefficient libraries with you!

Tired of sky-high memory prices? Buckle up, we're in this for the long haul

Re: All right! It's time for human ingenuity to step up...

Forget about the vibecoding. At least in the US, Amazon is now sticking its Rufus AI “assistant” on every page when ordering groceries (can’t attest to other things, but ‘tis the season), from Amazon Fresh and Whole Wallet. A month or so ago, you could tell it to go away, and it would at least for a certain amount of time. But now there’s no way to get rid of it other than closing the little pop-up window, which isn’t so little because it actually covers a lot of the things you want to look at. If you close it, it’ll reappear as soon as you enter another search term. So my fearless prediction for 2026 is that international commerce will crash, not because the orange doofus keeps spinning the dial on the tariffs-o-meter, but because everybody gives up on Amazon and all its resellers.

Apple….

…is well known for charging an arm and a leg for memory upgrades from the base model. Maybe they have some leeway to help out the poor punter for a few years?

In any case, the “integrated” memory in a (single CPU chip) M4 Mac Studio has a bandwith of 480 GByte/s. Not entirely shabby, if not (yet) HBM-like, by a factor of two.

UK.gov accused of Grinching Christmas by ignoring phone theft scourge

Re: Interesting bit on the BBC 2 months ago

All these suggestions are so genteel. Arm a few dozen coppers with lethal handguns and pay them a £50 bounty for every phone thief they plug. Yee ha!

England keeping pen and paper exams despite limited digital expansion

Re: There is no requirement for a specific make of pen

Child abuse?

Apple blocks dev from all accounts after he tries to redeem bad gift card

I've been trying to figure out as well....

....why a professional would want to store critical (either to his business or his family memories) files only in a commercial cloud.

I could almost see the business side, assuming he worked from a variety of locations and didn't want to be bothered toting around an external hard drive as well as his laptop (but really, what does an 8 Gbyte drive and enclosure weigh these days?), but not having both business and family stuff backed up locally, preferably to at least two pieces of storage.... just produces a "Does not compute" message in my head. As does purchasing a gift card (with a credit or debit card?) instead of simply paying Apple with a credit or debit card.

Something smells just a little bit off here. Whether it's personal idiosyncrasies or some sort of scam, I cannot glean from the information provided.

US freezes $42B trade pact with UK over digital tax row

The last time there was a "know-nothing populist arsehole"

....candidate for the democratic nomination for the presidency was in 1972, when George Wallace was running well behind more popular (and in George McGovern's case, more truly populist) candidates when he was shot in the county where I now live, and crippled. Since then, the racist-anti-intellectual, anti-government market has been cornered by Republicans.

Democrats may still nominate sphincters, but not know-nothings.

Apple, Google forced to issue emergency 0-day patches

Re: Thanky for the reminder

Right. And a lucky thing it is that they're nagged.

Roomba maker iRobot gets cleaned out in Chapter 11

Aaaaand….

….you’ll be here all week, right?

Datacenters are hoarding grid power just in case, says Uptime Institute

If....

AI "data" (really compute) centers follow the example of Mad King Elon's RacistAI™ farms, high-demand power falls back on rows of methane-powered generators. Swell (not).

Re: Hmm

Uh.... no. Any sensible wind/solar deployment has battery or "battery" (e.g. water pumping) as part of the energy solution.

Firefox adds AI Window, users want AI wall to keep it out

Safari?

I believe on every Apple platform, there’s a simple “AI. No thanks” Setting option. As in, nowhere on the device.

De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

Microsoft….

…. probably didn’t sue any of the originators of the distros because they remembered how they got off scot free when Apple, with considerable justification, tried to sue them for the visual language in the Windows desktop, stolen directly from the Mac OS of the day (System some-number-or-other).

SpaceX and Musk called on to rescue China's Shenzhou-20 crew

Debris?

Tiangong spends its time between 340 and 450 km. The 2007 Chinese ASAT test target was orbiting at ~ 865 km at the time. Ant debris that made it down the 400 - 500 km difference in heights had a significant radially downward component to its velocity, and would long ago have deorbited.