Posts by Zack Mollusc

Microsoft says 8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone running Windows 11

Re: Surely a better fix is doing the following:

I can comment re printers. Often have to copy files from up-to-date win11 laptop onto thumbdrive and thence to linux machine on the same LAN to be printed out over the same LAN.

In microsoft's defence, the printer is from a very obscure manufacturer (Xerox) and is using a crazy protocol that has only been around since 1991 (Jetdirect).

Win11 doesn't even fail or complain about drivers it just ignores the existence of the printer. Except on the rare days when it sees it and works fine. Quality software.

The AI bubble is already popping; we just don't know it yet

Bah

Wall street exploded the global economy in 2008 because they could not fully understand mortgages, why would anyone expect them to behave sanely today?

Tech buyers are baking in sovereignty from day one, says Forrester

interesting data to be had

If you do your own sovereign AI, you will learn what it can and can't do and what it takes to do it. If you outsource you have to trust what some salesweasel says it is capable of.

NASA Swift rescue mission spins into trouble during commissioning

turtles

Just send another swift to latch onto the first one.

SpaceX just about nails Starship test flight 13

Good points well made!

Presumably, you will be downvoted to oblivion.

Burnham wants Big Ecommerce to bankroll Britain's pubs

Re: Pretty much all costs are simply too high in the UK

I thought the problem was a _lack_ of policemen on the street? Are you saying they are out there and contributing to the begging, pooing and hoodying?

Re: 2 separate problems

Did you mean to type "decades-long" , because it has been going on for at least 50 years?

SpaceX to try its luck again with Starship Flight 13 after engines and weather say no

Re: Public company woes

If starship gets to the point where it can put 30t tons into orbit for the same price that competitors put 1 ton into orbit, you can build a big rubbish satellite far cheaper than an exotic-materials-and-manufacturing small satellite to do the same job. Think bolted-together steel parts, thick cheap radiation shielding around consumer grade electronics, redundant crappy attitude jets, bigger tanks for propellant etc.

Re: Successful launch

It will be very interesting to see the final payload to orbit figure. If this launch was 34 tons to a suborbital flight and had all the propellant tanks maxed out, then the ship can be shortened to remove unused cargo bay volume and this may free up the mass for a circularisation burn.

Even 30 tons payload in a recoverable rocket would be comparable to STS and you could translate that to 30 tons of boil-off mitigation experiments or 30 tons of airlock and habitation testing etc

I wonder if there is any weight saving/improved resilience of the tiles that will be cost effective once starship is being caught and re-used?

Re: Successful launch

Disastrous flight for the anti-musk crowd as spacex did not immediately detonate starship upon landing, thus they could not claim the flight exploded or that it was melted and not in a fit state to be re-used. They will have to fall back on pointing out that it has yet to orbit or reach mars or carry astronauts or any of the other things that have not yet been attempted.

Re: RUD Please

"Oversized"?

Billing software error sends billion-dollar AWS estimates

Hmm...

... when this kind of thing happens again, after everyone has sacked their office staff and now have AI settling invoices and running the company, how long will it take to sort out? Will the AI recognise the company is now billions in debt and wind the whole operation up? Will it negotiate a loan of billions from the bank's AI? Will it instantly sell any and all of the company's assets and holdings? How many legal AIs will be instructed and what will their bills look like?

The whole thing may only take seconds. Thank goodness the CEOs implementing all this are competent and farsighted enough to build in safeguards.

Microsoft flips Windows Backup to on by default unless you're in the EU

No thanks

It probably won't work, or if it works now a patch tomorrow will break it and an update next week will remove it.

AI bills are baffling the C-suite after shift to usage-based pricing

Re: Agreed!

Ooopsy! Good catch!

Agreed!

So they want more money? So what? Just tell them it has been a bad year and payment will be reviewed in 18 months. Meanwhile, get rid of half of them and make the rest work twice as hard.

This is basic leadership stuff.

Windows 11 turns five, leaving some important lessons for Microsoft

Of course windows makes money

How can windows not make money? They charge £100 for home and £200 for pro. What are their costs?

A few grand a year for half a dozen unpaid and untrained interns vibe coding updates.

£0 on testing.

£0 on support.

Easy money.

UK school’s network left wide open for invasion, student found

He did the right thing

Not reporting it is the correct thing to do as he would undoubtedly have faced repercussions and even if by some miracle the school was embarrassed into tightening the security, the next idiot put in charge would throw all the security away again.

AI coding agents could soon cost more than the developers using them

Not a problem

There is no issue here as the AI models are not employees. There is no limit on how much money can be spent on consultants or contractors or external specialists who have no interest in the wellbeing of the company, it is only when people directly employed by the company need to be paid that the boardroom is sent into a hysterical panic and the purse strings are tightened.

The new database world according to Google: Inexact queries and AI in everything

Yes, they do..

..but they are unable to distinguish between an exact and useful answer and a hallucination, they only see that one is (currently) cheaper.

Humanity trashed Earth orbit – next stop the Moon

Lumpiness FTW!!!

I seem to recall that there are very few stable lunar orbits, so the likelihood of any particular discarded lunar transfer stage staying in orbit long enough to cause problems is quite small.

Why Amazon hates 'human-in-the-loop' AI governance

Hahaha, classic!

So, in the ER example, fallible machines continuously give false positives to the humans in the loop and this trains the humans to doubt the veracity of the positive signals.

Big-brain Brandwine's solution is not to reduce the fallibility of the machines giving false data, but to remove the humans and pass the false positives to another fallible and more gullible machine to act upon this data. Give the man a billion stock options, we can't afford to lose him.

EU won't force publishers to grant dead video games an afterlife

Re: How about...

Yeah, that is a good point. Even grandfathering in all the copyrights for games existing before my proposal, it would kind of screw the guys creating assets to licence to games companies. I had only thought as far as trying to remove the copyright stumbling block when reverse-engineering.

Re: This discussion needs a little bit of cold water from the other side of the fence

You say - if the EU attempts to legislate any of this stuff, you will just end up with no online games any more, or hopelessly crippled games, or really expensive games.

Since the current scenario is that the really expensive, hopelessly crippled games are no longer available online when the servers get switched off, that isn't much of a threat.

Re: How about...

Well, if it is known that when a game goes out of support, DMCA and copyright are revoked, you factor that in when you sell or licence your copyright assets to the game producer. Maybe it takes the form of selling the copyright outright, maybe it takes the form of some kind of insurance that the game will be supported for X years.

How about...

once the company signals, by removing access to the servers, that it has no further interest in their software, DMCA and copyright is revoked for that software?

If there is no longer a commercial case for keeping an online game running, there is no damage done by others examining the code and making their own servers.

Waymo hits the brakes after robotaxis keep missing the signs for freeway construction zones

Did you see that ludicrous display last night?

Microsoft's latest Windows bug belongs in the Recycle Bin

recognising

Microsoft recognising that they need to improve is a lot like a junkie recognising they need to give up smack or a morbidly obese person recognising that they need to cut down on the pies. It is a fleeting moment of uncharacteristic clarity.

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

Re: It never was “just an API migration”

But I just want to sing!

Starship shows it can deploy satellites, but Moon mission clock still ticks

good progress!

Thrust to weight was significantly improved as could be seen at liftoff, the upper stage was less explodey than the v2 and still hit the flight profile despite one engine conking out, more flatpack pretend satellites were dispensed and the craft made a non-melting re-entry to a hover and soft landing. Great stuff.

Shame about the lack of engine relight in space and the loss of the booster, but it looks like they are making progress.

There are a lot of people whining about how ridiculous the plan is to have an orbital fuel depot and dozens of refuelling flights to enable starship to fly from LEO to the lunar surface.

What other options are there for delivering 100 ton chunks of moon base infrastructure? The moon base plans of the sixties and seventies envisioned 150 launches of _expendable_ rockets to build a moon base, that would seem quite expensive if boeing or SLS are doing it.

Classic 7 is Windows 10 LTSC cosplaying as Windows 7

Re: Steer clear of these types of Remuxes if you value your security

If you can spell security, you probably know better than to use windows.

Microsoft aims to speed Windows with 'leap forward' in WinUI 3 perf

Re: Too little, too late

Office was once superb? Damn it, I must have missed that version

SpaceX Starship completes Wet Dress Rehearsal, gets ready for launch

Re: 5,000 metric tons (more than 11 million pounds)

25 Blue Whales, Shirley?

Vi clone written in BASIC proves old habits :wq hard

Re: 6 Decades ago

Hehe. I read it as sixty years and was reading the comments to find an explanation. Thank you.

NASA boss: make Pluto a planet again

Still seems arbitrary

If the criteria is 'cleared its orbit of other junk' , is this just a matter of time? Will Pluto eventually clear its orbit?

SpaceX dusts off Falcon Heavy for first flight in 18 months

Re: Demonstrated capability

You say "Demonstrated so far have been ~20t to sub-orbital speed/altitude", but that isn't the full story.

Demonstrated so far have been ~20t to sub-orbital speed/altitude whilst carrying control surfaces and heat shielding and enough reserve fuel to successfully re-enter and steer to a precision target and relight the engines and do a propulsive landing.

Just like DC-X, except DC-X had no payload and only reached 3.2 km altitude and obviously didn't do a re-entry.

Shuttle carried a few tons more and reached actual gosh-darned orbit, but starship seems to be closing the performance gap.

Apple has an opportunity to rediscover humanity in its push toward AI

Form over function

Jobs was the leader in form over function, his craven lackeys, sorry, independent creative successors, merely continued this genius approach.

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

Re: MMB

JFK killing was the cheapest hit ever. Only tree fiddy.

HP's remote desktop push retreats as Anyware heads for end of life

Thanks for the heads-up!

I am the CEO for a global organisation whose running is entirely dependant on this product and have therefore scheduled a meeting for late Oct 2029 in order to address this issue before it becomes a problem.

Waymo's self-driving cars face their toughest test yet: London

my prediction...

is that the waymos will need constant human input, either on-board or remote, to get them through the narrow gaps with which they seem to struggle and which are a constant feature of Lahndan driving.

Claude Code cache chaos creates quota complaints

Hilarious!

Firstly, if "AI" was even half as useful as is being claimed, nobody would bitch about the price going up or the quality reducing slightly.

Secondly, everyone saying that the "AI" companies will need to increase fees to cover their costs. Cover their costs? The tech bros are trying to do the next NFT or crypto where you charge a fortune for providing bugger all. If your use of their platform costs them £10, expect to be paying thousands for the privilege.

Suits won't quit AI spending, even if they can't prove it's working

Surely...

...the CEO and CFO of _all_ workplaces...?

Artemis II blasts off on first crewed lunar mission since Apollo

Tanker flights

Multiple launches to allow a trip to the moon seems, on the face of it, a backward and needlessly complicated step, but since most of the mass of a trip to the moon from LEO is fuel, (80%+ I think?) there seems to be a case for cryo fuel transfer and storage in orbit being cheaper and sooner than the ludicrous size of the rocket and launch facilities needed to put a moon base down from one launch.

Unmanned, cheap, reusable rockets to build up a reserve of propellant in orbit, then one manned launch to fill up in LEO and thence the moon.

Anthropic admits Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

Slop Machines, you say?

Microsoft reaches for yet another out-of-band patch to deal with latest update issue

Supertanker? More like a raft!

Microsoft is more like a raft than a supertanker, one that has had whatever flotsam that came to hand lashed to it in an attempt to expand it and keep it afloat.

Anthropic tweaks timed usage limits to discourage Claude demand during peak hours

Re: Gosh, who *could have guessed this would happen*

Especially, don't pay for something when it is unclear how much you are buying and what you are being charged.

Go for a walk, man: Sony's drive to create a car parked by partner Honda

lucky Honda

Probably a good thing for Honda, they were probably spending a fortune to comply with Sony's insistence on DRM in everything so you could not start the engine without wearing Sony clothing, only Sony subscribers could be passengers, no rival manufacturers products could be transported in the boot etc

North Korea's 100,000-strong fake IT worker army rake in $500M a year for Kim Jong Un

How is this different

from when I employ a company to do or supply something and they secretly spy on me and sell the information/ do a shit job using subcontractors / lie about their company ?

Out-of-band getting out of hand as Microsoft pushes hotpatch for Bluetooth

Re: Linux Security Roundup for Week 11, 2026 Reveals Critical Fixes

How are we supposed to get on with life when you missed out the 6809?

'Are you freaking crazy?' Bot harasses woman, gets led away by cops

Prior art

Are the Chinese being advised by Abelard Snazz?

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

Re: 'Female'

Disgusting! They should throw a bucket of water over them!