Posts by Neil Barnes

Malaysia and Indonesia block X over failure to curb deepfake smut

Freetube is your friend.

Re: Wankwords.

With a long enough lever and somewhere to place a fulcrum, you could move the world, they said.

So I tried to apply that leverage to data, and the lever broke, AI, my foot!

The one with a copy of Archimedes in the pocket --->

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

Re: consumers are returning to physical media like CDs

Nothing exotic: five albums in finest cardboard slip cases, but under twenty euros.

https://www.amazon.com/Original-Album-Classics-Allman-Brothers/dp/B00ZWMG3MU

consumers are returning to physical media like CDs

Some of us never left.

For what it's worth, I ripped a boxed Allman Brothers' set last night, and Rhythmbox just did it, pictures and all.

Brussels plots open source push to pry Europe off Big Tech

Re: Software IP

Dr Syntax has been eaten by a prune.

CES 2026 worst in show: AI girlfriends, a fridge that won't open unless you talk to it, and more

It's an interesting minimax calculation. As an engineer, I want (to design) something which lasts forever, and in the unlikely event of it failing in some way, may easily be repaired. As a production engineer, I want to reduce build costs to a minimum. As a salesman, I want something which appeals to the buyer - through perceived quality, long guarantees, easy repairability, no-hassle money back offers or whatever. As a company, I want the customer to like it enough that they feel the need to buy another one soon enough to keep me in business... but I really don't want it to last forever.

I guess that's why I'm an engineer.

(Except with mechanical watches and clocks. There are examples of both which have been happily running with greater or lesser maintenance for centuries. Even cheap watches can last decades. Or cars: mine is thirty years old and working very happily, and it's not the only one - though modern cars seem to need a lot more expensive maintenance. Funny that. But cars don't last long in real numbers: a car with a couple of hundred thousand miles on the clock is generally considered tired, and will have probably only four or five thousand hours of operation; not that long compared to a fridge motor, or indeed a commercial jet engine.)

Re: Sometimes you have to

Was that, I wonder, a hangover from shipping tea in the China Clippers: sail powered, floating on salt water, and probably not all that watertight?

Re: Sometimes you have to

Just ordered a kilo of Lapsang Suchong. That comes in a sealed pack, and goes into a sealed container from where it is metered out to a handy jar for daily use.

White goods must be a manufacturer's worst nightmare. They're all mature tech, and people can remember when they were designed to - and did - last thirty or forty years before they needed repairs. And then, they _could_ be repaired; parts were available.

These days? They're designed to last two days past the guarantee, be irreparable, and with user interfaces designed to cause user insanity. Because all they can do to make them stand out in the crowd of other white goods in the store is give them functionality which is neither helpful nor wanted, and stick an extra zero on the price.

Artificial brains could point the way to ultra-efficient supercomputers

Re: If the Human Brain

The wonder is not that the dog dances so well, but that it can dance at all...

The first computer I ever saw was analogue... I do wonder how much more efficient, and smaller, they might have become (for appropriate problems, of course) had the transistors in an operational amplifier followed the size changes of those in logic chips. Though I suspect that decreased signal to noise ratio at small geometries might become a limiting factor somewhat sooner (not my field; just speculating).

Copper supplies set to peak just as tech needs more

Hmm, aluminium wires for motor cores?

Apparently so: https://www.ricardo.com/en/news-and-insights/industry-insights/alumotor-the-environmentally-efficient-e-motor-solution

Boffins probe commercial AI models, find an entire Harry Potter book

Re: access Anna's archive ... 'this page has been sat on by the copyright police'

Sadly not: "Diese Webseite ist aus urheberrechtlichen Gründen nicht verfügbar.

Zu den Hintergründen informieren Sie sich bitte hier."

Looks like it's been stopped at ISP or higher.

Re: Hang on a minute…

Currently, trying to access Anna's archive from Germany leads one to a 'this page has been sat on by the copyright police' notice.

Tech that helps people outshone overhyped AI at CES 2026

SeeHaptic

I believe something along those lines was predicted by SF in the sixties - Fred Pohl's 'Years of the City' comes to mind, but I'm not certain. I am very pleased that something with this much use is now available. One of these (each) for the designers and the team --->

ChatGPT Health wants your sensitive medical records so it can play doctor

Re: Self-driving cars and diagnostic robots

This was discussed, at a basic level, in the UK some years ago. Many people - myself included - objected to their medical data being exported from their local doctor's surgery into a grand research database... all fully anonymised, of course. But aggregated by postcode, so in blocks of under a hundred people or so - a postcode might cover only fifteen houses.

I wonder how many people have my medical history in my postcode? Hmm...

Most people don't think as far ahead as lunchtime.

Logitech macOS mouse mayhem traced to expired dev certificate

Re: Luckily for me...

I'm of the vintage that remembers the INT33H calls for mouse movements... these days, two buttons and a scroll wheel suffices for my needs, and don't require any drivers adding.

Mine's a M150 with an associated K220 keyboard; it just works. I can hear the purists gnashing their teeth already :)

Lego crams an ASIC in a brick to keep kids interested

Re: So much for pure imagination...

See also Meccano... Lego taught me about interlacing rows of bricks so the house didn't fall down; Meccano taught me how to build a car, or a truck, or a plane, or a rock crawler, or a roundabout, or...

(And I do wonder how these little lego thingies are recharged... I'm seeing a convenient box with a coil of wire around it; drop 'em in, pull charged up ones out of the bottom?)

this aging Vulture screams

And this aging commentard... sometime in the last year, as she approached the grand old age of fifteen, granddaughter disposed of her childhood lego.

Less lego, and more legone...

Optimus Schmoptimus - Boston Dynamics' humanoid robot is already in mass production

useful robots that can <...> help make our lives safer, more productive, and more fulfilling

Your plastic pal who's fun to be with? No doubt it can assist you to the employment office to find a job to replace yours...

StockHistory function becomes StockMystery as Microsoft Excel bugs out

Re: Stop the errors - add more AI

Perhaps there's a new RFC in the offing? Instead of a connection error message, return an advert?

Baby's got clack: HP pushes PC-in-a-keyboard for businesses with hot desks

Close... it's a laptop with a dead battery and a broken screen. And someone nicked your mouse.

Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

Re: "all this is old news"

This one is also on my list of possibilities, though for some reason (<sarc>can't think why</sarc>) they do seem more expensive here than the mid range TVs.

Phoning home from the streaming box is kinda implicit, and as that's how we get our pictures, that's how it goes. But it doesn't e.g. throw adverts in at random on the 'broadcast' channels, and whatever it's doing to the internet half of the signal, my adblock kills.

(Though there's a rather irritating advert which has popped up unchanged - a bloke complaining about a cold, and his partner recommending some patent nostrum... and in four years, it still hasn't cured him. I'm not quite sure what they're selling there!)

Re: "all this is old news"

I too have an approximately 10 year old Panasonic, unconnected to any network. It too tries to phone home at irregular hours, but behaves perfectly otherwise.

Panasonic are first on my list for testing.

Re: Not here

I don't know the details, but there is at least one datapath from TV via HDMI to an HDMI source; it's used for sending remote control signals back (or possibly the other way).

It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that it could be used as a backchannel to phone home...

Re: "all this is old news"

Exactly the question I am asking at the moment.

A TV which requires you to accede to 'terms and conditions' before you use it is right out of the window. A TV which limits its basic fundamental operation without a network connection is right out of the window.

All I want to do is use the thing as a display device. I don't care for 'smart' TV stuff; I don't use the majority of the options offered (I'm old and prefer scheduled programming to binge-watching 'curated' programmes) and those I do use are infinitely better on a computer where I can e.g. kill the bloody adverts. I am definitely not at home to Mr We Know What You're Watching.

If the sales model for the TV makers (or indeed, any other product) requires them to sell data about their users, then they're in the wrong business.

(At the moment, still unconfirmed, it appears that LG and Panasonic offer suitable sets. I need to go and annoy some salespeople.)

Claude is his copilot: Rust veteran designs new Rue programming language with help from AI bot

Claude is along for the ride as copilot

I see what you did there!

Users prompt Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot to remove clothes in photos then 'apologize' for it

Re: Consequences

We have arrived at a point whereby unless we are in the physical presence of a second party, we cannot assume that they performed any action attributed to them. Period.

We can speak to 'someone' on the phone, but without external mechanisms cannot prove that it is the person with whom we expected to speak.

We can 'see' them perform actions, but don't know whether or not they were performed, or whether the actors were those portrayed.

We can read prose without any immediate clue as to whether it was written by the claimed author, or represents his views, or is a distortion thereof.

It's all very depressing.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella becomes AI influencer, asks us all to move beyond slop

forcing AI on everyone despite protestations

I can choose to use a browser that doesn't contain any 'AI' rubbish, and similarly an equally bereft code editor, email client, office suite, video player... And that's fine; I do so.

What I can't do is choose not to deal with the misbegotten automated apologies for customer service that are foisted upon us, save by never using the company again...

I'm old fashioned. I firmly believe that a computer system which does not deliver the same response to the same question, every time, is broken.

The Y2K bug delayed my honeymoon … by 17 years!

Re: I carefully arranged things

And the BBC had been defined by the government as 'the fifth emergency service' over that period. It was very satisfying at the time, when presented with obstruction over my investigations, to be able to say "would you like to come with me to the Director General's office to explain?"...

I carefully arranged things

So that all my y2k work was done before the grand occasion (including upgrading a couple of HP mainframes) and took three weeks off.

New Year's Eve saw me on Copocabana beach with an estimated six million Brazilians (it's quite a big beach; 3km long), my (now) wife, and a modicum of caipirinhas.

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

Re: Open Source

I think Siemens started out sometime in the 1850s.

Zuck buys Chinese AI company Manus that claims it deals in actions, not words

Re: "you want dried leaves in boiling water, with the juice squirted out of a cow?"

In other words, something almost but not entirely unlike tea?

knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them

So you want dried leaves in boiling water, with the juice squirted out of a cow?

Coming Wi-Fi 8 will bring reliability rather than greater speed

the Teams session automatically transfers back to the PC

Which has meanwhile been stolen, you foolishly having left it unattended...

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

I note in parentheses that the MS FAT32 file system will fall over in 2107... It's been deprecated for years but it's still one file system that _everything_ understands, so I'm sure it will still be around.

Humanoid robots are still novelty acts, but investment is surging to make them real tomorrow

Re: God would have given all of us two digits instead of five with opposable thumbs

a fork lift is a perfectly good industrial robot

Bit bloody big for lifting little things like forks, though...

UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered: First ever version of UNIX written in C is running again

Re: It's almost as if it were a Christmas miracle!

Then he deserves a beer, too. I should improve my reading skills, no beer for me.

It's almost as if it were a Christmas miracle!

One of these --->

for Len Shustak, for recovering the data, and one for Liam for using the subjunctive mood; something rarely seen in computing.

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

This has been the subject of a long-ago El Reg article, but one time I shipped some computers from the UK to Tajikistan, via Russia (the only way you _could_ ship anything, at the time). When they arrived, the two pallets they had left on had mutated into any number of smaller packages, and _mysteriously_ the PCs - top end 486s! - had had processors, memory, and drives literally ripped from the motherboards, damaging things in the process. Oddly enough, the high-end audio cards fitted, which cost more than the entire PC, remained in place; probably not recognised or mistaken for something commodity cheap.

Re: Maybe the answer to soaring RAM prices is to use less of it !!!

/me smugly points out that I am somewhat masochistically designing a FAT32 system to work with compact flash on a 2MHz 65c02 with a whole 32kB of ram to play with!

(And in response to Watford Electronic prices, I still remember the shock of buying two 1k by 4 memory chips from Technomatic in 1978... for a tenner each.)

Uber and Lyft rolling Baidu robotaxis into London next year

Re: bringing another safe and reliable travel option to Londoners

Of course, if we're going to be picky, the rails don't constrain the train; they merely provide guidance. The shape of the wheels constrains the train to remain on the track...

Re: Robotaxis are not the answer

Or in my case, stick four people, their luggage, and three paragliders in the car; drive around seven hundred miles in a day (through three countries) to the flying site/accommodation; and spend a week or two ferrying fliers back from their (often surprising) landing sites. Or to drive from Berlin to visit family at various locations in the UK, from the Midlands to the Isle of Skye

These are not use cases which fit most rental options simply on grounds of costs. It's certainly not a scenario in which a robot vehicle is going to work (a friend used an electric vehicle for the same trip last year, and required two days to make the journey). As for a manned taxi? That rich I'm not. (For curiosity, what's the per mile rate for a robot taxi versus a manned taxi? Or is this something that isn't really applicable?

I have to bear in mind that my car is paid for, reasonably high mileage, and I consider its purchase as a sunk cost; there is no per-mile depreciation to consider. But it costs me probably ten euros a day to keep it (I haven't looked at the receipts) whether I drive it or not. So I may as well drive it...

Re: bringing another safe and reliable travel option to Londoners

Ooops, their there...

bringing another safe and reliable travel option to Londoners

Another? What's their reference, then? From my time their, the most reliable service was the underground.

Still, it won't be a concern for me since I will not use any unconstrained vehicle without a human driver.

Pizza restaurant signage caught serving raw Windows

Re: I recently 'dined' at Luton Airport

My apologies; I failed to note the badge :)

Re: I recently 'dined' at Luton Airport

That was the point at which I started to leave, fuming. I had reluctantly decided to use their website link to order, but when they wanted to install an application on my phone? FOAD, guys.

With all due respect to the AC poster above, there's a difference between 'not interacting with people' and 'abuse of my hardware (and patience)'.

I recently 'dined' at Luton Airport

Where the proprietors of the 'restaurant' not only had the temerity to require me to order online, but also to create an account so to do _and_ enter my payment details before ordering.

Fortunately, standing up and walking out triggered a waiter magically to appear and take my order (and kudos to them, they would not accept a tip when I paid _after_ eating).

FFS - people like interacting with people. Employ people, not robots.

Google sends Dark Web Report to its dead services graveyard

ACR technology

As it happens, I'm looking for a new TV that will work without complaint when completely unable to connect to a network... any thoughts?

Just to explain it to the TV makers in words of less than three syllables: no f'in' ads on TVs I own.

Infinite Machine e-scooter is like the offspring of a Vespa and a Cybertruck

Re: Not think of the pedestrian

Nor is tripping over one, should they be bought by some crazy buyer in the ebike rental sector, and dumped all over the pavements like their cohorts already are...

Re: Uncompromisingly ugly

My first glimpse at the pictures suggested a cardboard box cutout model... to my boring English eyes, there's not a lot to recommend it visually over any other number of electric bikes of one sort or another, and a lot to dislike about it on aesthetic grounds. But I suppose tastes differ. And I suppose new and intellectually exciting visual design cues is why the Cybertruck is so popular and well thought of.

I can see why El Reg didn't include a full picture of either model in the article.