Posts by Neil Barnes

OpenAI to flood your eyeballs with visual ads

Re: Donatas Smailys said:

Hmm, internet connected allegedly 'smart' washing machines from the likes of Samsung, LG, Kenmore and no doubt others rather suggest that it's already changed...

Re: Donatas Smailys said:

Aliexpress search is perhaps already doing it: certainly, their search for (e.g. EOL memory chips) returns very few EOL memory chips, an awful lot of generic electrotrash, the occasional toaster, shoes, and ladies' underwear. Also tyres, for some reason. One day I'll understand the logic, but I may have to meditate on a mountaintop first.

Isn't it funny how almost the entire internet is predicated on a method invented a hundred years ago to sell soap?

OpenAI's wandering AI agents earn it a California subpoena

Same old, same old

It's not the 'company' that causes the damage. It's the people that run the company. They're the ones who should be getting fined, or better, jail time.

Stanford prof is beating the drum for a new protocol to replace TCP

Re: Obligitary xkcd

Yup, I have no idea how that happened. I _typed_ 695, but somebody must have moved the keyboard between 9 and 5.

Re: Obligitary xkcd

Amazing how we are coming to remember the classic three XKCDs without having to click the link to check...

#327 (Little Bobby Tables)

#697 (Spirit)

#927 (Standards)

One of these for Randall --->

Once a $35 computer, the 2 GB Raspberry Pi 4 now costs $67.50

Re: Nice while it lasted

My embedded world is vaguely similar - wow, this 6502 has a whole 32kB! (but also FAT32, nearly) - and the only potential Pi project I considered was to attach a camera to an astronomical telescope. But it can wait...

Trump decrees era of 'Super Intelligence' upon us

Surely that was the 'rouge menace'?

Firefox 157: Could bold new look be just what Mozilla needs?*

Re: Is it?

Does it include NoScript and U-Block Origin out of the box? No? As you were, then.

KDE turns 30 with Plasma 6.8, but the X11 session isn't invited

X11 applications will continue to work through XWayland.

I'm curious to find out how Kicad works with XWayland, given the dire warnings here: https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/

As it happens, I have a spare laptop with nothing to do (it's sound is broken but I don't think that's an issue for Kicad) so I may play and find out.

Schneider gives datacenter switchgear the software-defined treatment

Software controlled?

Like that update that turned off all those Korean fridges last week?

Meh, what could possibly go wrong?

Dutch police arrest 'security pro' in ShinyHunters probe

He subsequently returned to legitimate cybersecurity work

Some genius employed him with his recent record? How?

Microsoft's Copilot super app comes with a meter attached

Re: CoPilot

It's all fine in theory, but SWMBO's new laptop just arrived complete with a USB charger. In Germany, which I'm pretty sure is in Europe.

Microsoft tells nonprofits their deleted M365 data isn't coming back

Re: "Shouldn't 'cock-up' be hyphenated?"

Gone off at half cock?

Microsoft cells out, crams multiple values into Excel boxes

Re: Standards

I wonder whether it would be easier to record within a cell, each change made to that cell, the person who did it, and the date and time... or simply do a sequence of git commits after each change?

Re: Standards

Wasn't that a film about giant worms?

ABBYY gives old-school OCR a job in the AI pipeline

Re: Not Actually AI… more BYOAI

The version of Abbyy I was using worked really well for this: my application needed to extract the original text (obviously) but also metadata relating to font size, weight, and style, page layout, white space etc. If converting from a printed page to a text stream this is essential (curiously, one very important thing is correctly identifying paragraphs and scene break white space between them - you're trying to locate something that essentially isn't there).

Abbyy produced an output consisting of individual lines of text with the necessary data - and specifically, the location of the line on the page - in an XML file which could easily be parsed to reconstruct the original text and (streamable) layout. Tesseract, for example, was very good at reading text but doesn't track 'empty' lines at scene breaks, and nor did it identify e.g. italics or relative font size. It handled multiple columns fine, though.

Hmph.

In a previous life I made much use of Abbyy running under linux, with a paid-for lifetime license, 12,000 pages per year from memory.

Some years later they turned off the license server and provided neither an alternative way to activate the product if you updated the distribution or computer, nor a replacement product (indeed, this looks like a replacement, but it's only available for a year outside enterprise?).

I really liked the product - it provided essential (for me) metadata in a convenient form that e.g. Tesseract doesn't - but once bitten and all that, I'm not inclined to return to the fold.

Google's TPUs to catch some rays in orbit next week

a temperature controlled vacuum chamber

How does that work, then? It's a long time since I was at school, but I'm pretty certain that temperature is a property of matter, not vacuum. Unlike an atmosphere, or a lump of rock, vacuum simply doesn't have anything to have a temperature.

Google smacks forehead, realizes $899+ thin-and-lights were what it was missing

Re: Close, but no banana

Hell, I don't even buy laptops for myself less than two or three years old. End of lease Dells, usually, at a tenth of the new prices. Then replace the OS with Mint and they're happy for years.

Though my wife's fifteen-month old Acer is about to be replaced by something else: it has developed an odd fault - I think in the USB hardware - that started with noisy audio, then no audio at all, no audio devices listed, external usb audio devices not recognised, and if plugged into my normal desktop USB expander, it passes video fine, but still no visible audio device, and also no external wireless keyboard or mouse. Annoying.

I wish to be scathing about the concept

But really, I think all the important points have already been mentioned.

Chromebooks were a good idea when they were launched, right up until you realised you could do little offline. They were a better idea when people realised you could replace the OS with Linux. But now they're just locked down extensions of Google. No thanks.

Longtime SUSE staff asked if they'd opt for 'voluntary separation'

I must be old...

When I see 'long serving employees' I think thirty years plus... guess I was born too soon.

Treasury chief says AI bosses, not their bots, will carry the can for criminal acts

Re: They may already be responsible under current law

So hold the model responsible, and shut it down (for all users) once it is shown to have behaved in what would be for a human an illegal way.

Then fine the CEO.

British Army spends £16M on 1,000 pocket-sized eyes in the sky

On the other hand, *mazon is full of FPV drones at well under a hundred quid.

Saturate the defenders with those, then send in the expensive ones?

Researchers find way to listen in on headphones from afar

Re: ...the faintness of RF signals in devices like headphones...

I had kinda the same questions. From their experimental layout photo, it looked as if they were expecting an audio frequency (i.e. under 20kHz) trace of their injected signal, while the implication is that megahertz signals were used (it'd take a bloody big antenna to couple audio frequencies with anything other than near-field). I really wouldn't expect headphones and a generic microphone to do _anything_ much above 20kHz, and nor would I expect the codecs used to compress the sampled audio for distribution to allow it to pass, so that tells us little.

I do note though that many (older) phones used an earphone/headphone *cable* as a receiving aerial in the 100MHz band...

Injecting a heterodyne carrier into a class D amplifier to disturb its operating frequency would seem to be reasonable way to do this, and that looks like what they're demonstrating in the 'can you hear it' picture (no headphone cord). But if that's how they're doing it, rather than interfering with the source, then a cabled headphone is probably immune. Unless, of course, sufficient injected signal finds its way back to the headphone amplifier at the other end.

Bring on the AI swarms. They’re the only thing that can defend us now that AI is free

Re: Proliferation == bad

Ah. You haven't met my neighbours, then?

Ex-FTC boss Khan urges Uncle Sam to break out the handcuffs for AI CEOs, citing 1934 precedent

Re: She is right

I suspect more likely they'll die of a bad case of the security guards realising that there's no practical reason - as they have all the guns - that they should be on the outside while the bosses are on the inside...

Digital Research's GEM opens a new window on Linux

Re: Past experience

Sadly no, and I wish I still had my Tangerine system. I think it got accidentally left behind in a now-demolished building.

Re: Past experience

Acorn? Or perhaps Tangerine, as I did?

Re: Past experience

I predate both of you, I suspect: my first computer was a Sinclair MK14 which is still somewhere around the place. I believe my late father supplied reverse polarity to it though, so it's probably not a runner.

Dell's 52-inch enormo-monitor is a tsunami of impractical fun

Re: The Price !!

Ah? You buy a new car if it gets scratched?

one of the few aspects of computing that haven't got ridiculously expensive.

Perhaps not, but three thousand bucks for a screen is not something I'm likely to splash out on in the immediate future: it's over six times what I just paid for a 55" Panasonic TV, and probably ten times what I paid for the (pre-loved) laptop that's driving the 29" 4k monitor in front of me.

Mars astronauts could live in houses made of yeast and jello, say scientists

Martian yeast masters

Does anyone seriously believe that the colonists _would not_ keep a supply of yeast on hand? After all, it has so many handy uses.

Disembodied fruit fly brain joins the crypto speculation swarm

I'm finding that comment hard to swallow.

Curiously,

'Nature' tells me that the fruit fly has only around 140k neurons.

So few, and yet so irritating...

Chinese researchers find egg-cellent way to keep space debris from scrambling craft

/me looks in the fridge

and discovers, to my amazement, that eggs don't pack noticeably closely. Even in a hexagonal grid, there's a lot of space with a variable but decreasing amount of egg and very little where the ends are touching a nominal top and bottom.

Is the improvement in impact strength quoted related to the position at which the impactor strikes?

AI models don't kill people – people kill people

Re: AI "could kill us all by the end of the decade."

Is this how the world ends?

Not with a bang, but with a whimper... and a 3am ai generated social media post?

Huawei Watch D3 pumps up its health-monitoring credentials

Re: FFS!

Still waiting for something that can do a non-invasive continuous(ish) blood sugar measurement...

LG accused of 'egregious invasion of privacy' over TV data collection

Re: Why?

Yes and no. If your definition of 'works properly' is 'shows a picture presented to the HDMI input' (as I do) then the Panasonic I set up this morning, after a bit of head-scratching, makes me happy(ish).

I don't use streaming, just local sources one of which is a Magenta TV (German TV) set top box. I route the sources through an HDMI switcher what extracts the audio and lets me hear it through a decent sound system synchronously with the pictures.

The Panasonic selected none of the 'would you like' options, though it did position the selector over the 'accept all' - you know, personalised advertising, audio spying etc - and to its credit it did not require a network at any time (unless you want to use the supplied applications, which I don't). The network is set (now) to do not remind me.

One minor issue which took me a while to sort out: the Panasonic was turning off the Magenta TV box as soon as it connected; it recognised the box, advised me that keypresses would be passed through, and then turned it off. Amazing. Turns out that the HDMI ports are by default 'enhanced' and when that's deselected, things work as they should. Though I'm amused that on/off and channel selection is passed through, the volume control isn't. So you might still want two remotes...

Anyway, we'll see how things go.

Retired man turns spare room into Soviet-era supercomputer

Remember: the flat cap should _only_ be worn with the brown warehouse coat.

I approve this message

So here's one of these --->

Anthropic lays groundwork for bots that shop for you

Frankie Howerd said it best:

Nay, nay, and thrice nay!

The search company that plants trees just launched a Linux browser to help Europe battle big tech

a version of the company’s Chromium-based browser

I'm almost _sure_ that there are non-google browser engines out there that could have been used...

AI-assisted mushroom hunting is a recipe for a bad trip

Re: Russian Roulette for the numeracy deficient.

Interesting 'lookalikes', thanks.

I was extremely ill for several days after eating - in an Austrian restaurant - chantarelles. My wife who had the same dish was unaffected... who knows? But I've avoided them ever since. I hunt mushrooms only in the supermarket.

Microsoft will stop finishing your sentences in Word and Outlook

Well, the last thing 'they' want is an educated population/workforce. If they can't write properly without needing their hands held, soon they won't be able to read, either, and then we're back in the dark ages at the mercy of the organised religion tech bros.

Re: Could it be

To be fair, even locally managed text completion is a distracting pain in the backside.

Turns out Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private

The weapon shops of Isher called...

Re: The messages have to be in plaintext at some point otherwise neither party can read them.

Twice!

Colour me impressed

with the fact that so many people know enough about it to think it's a bad idea.

The sooner this sort of idiocy goes away, the better. Gentlemen do not read other's mail, at least without a warrant and a bloody good reason (not, e.g., he didn't write in English).

LibreOffice 26.8 is out – local first, and with no AI

Re: LibreOffice 26.8 still lets you switch to classic repositionable toolbars

You can indeed. One day I shall tell the tale of formatting (somebody else's) two thousand page document, each paragraph of which had a different style, even though they were all theoretically the same.

I refer to projects using LaTeX like LyX, which does not allow, without jumping through a lot of hoops, random styling. More significantly, it offers by default a selection of styling libraries such that your document will come out matched to a house style.

German-Japanese researchers invent electricity-free tech that could cool datacenters

Paging Mr Maxwell

Mr Maxwell to the white courtesy phone please, I think we've found one of your demons.