Posts by FIA

Quicksort inventor Tony Hoare reaches the base case at 92

That's a shame, but it's good to know you tried. Thank you. :)

Oh absolutely, they should be exceptional.

However Magee was a prominent figure in the early years of tech journalism. He founded the (now sadly defunct, but influential) 'Inquirer'. This was his second foray into online IT journalism after leaving the first publication he co-founded, a small tech news site called The register.

Despite this, and this very site having an obituaries section, I read about this elsewhere.

Keep these articles up Liam!! Always a good and informative read.

(If you'd ever consider doing an obit on one Mike Magee that would also be appreciated; there really should be one on these pages).

Operation Lightning takes down SocksEscort proxy network blamed for tens of millions in fraud

Re: Need a better AI prompt

If it's being sued then it's probably got other things on it's mind than writing good copy.

Ig Nobel Prize flees US for Switzerland after 35 years over safety concerns

Re: "concerns about the safety of those attending the US event." - clocks

² YouTube: Orson Welles Drunk Outtakes for Paul Masson Wine Commercial

And for completeness here's a pair of flutes talking about it.

PS. Thanks... I've been meaning to YouTube it since listening to that podcast...

RSS dulls the pain of the modern web

I was finding increasing 'Site not found' with PiHole, hitting refresh after the 2 second timeout would load the site.

This is pihole on a debian base. I think it was related to DNSMasq and how many levels of redirction it will follow, but I could never find a setting that fixed it.

A friend pointed me at technitium, which is also FOSS, and was nice and easy to set up. (My main issue was forgetting to enable a blocklist for the first few days).

I've had one issue similar to pihole, but I found a setting to control redirection and upped that and it's been rock solid ever since.

I run it the same as I did pihole, on top of a minimal debian VM under ProxMox.

Just thought it might be of interest to others here. :)

I've been having more and more issues with pihole recently, someone pointed me at this:

https://technitium.com/dns/

Been using it for the last month or so with fewer issues.

AI has made the Command Line Interface more important and powerful than ever before

Microsoft might be in store for a penny-drop moment when company brass realise its flagship software has just taken a severe blow and been outclassed by a bit of interface glue.

Why?

Around the time of Windows 8 MS started a project called MinWin to modularise Windows. Part of the goal of this was to remove the dependency on the GUI, it's why modern server OSs don't install one by default.

Pretty much everything in Windows is orchestratable by powershell, with a fairly consistent (if verbose) syntax. Seems ripe for AI'ing if that's your bag.

Britain spends £180M to work out what time it is

Re: What is this cesium of which you speak?

What is this cesium of which you speak?

It used to be called mrdogism.

Apple's budget-friendly MacBook Neo is bursting with color and compromise

I own an M1 Mac Mini which I've had for a good few years now, I did get the 16GB one but it still feels fast.

My main machine is an AMD 5900 12 core thingy. The Mac doesn't feel like a slouch in comparison.

Trump orders purge of 'woke' Anthropic from government

*insofar as any big businesses have moral fibre, which ain’t usually a whole lot, but in this case and so far Anthropic seems to be doing better than most.

Businesses have no moral fibre, they're businesses.

Businesses act in the way that they think best serves their customers.

Be a customer of businesses that assume their customers have morals, that's the best you can do.

Oh, and be a customer of a business too.... not just part of the supply chain.... (this means exchanging money that's slightly more than the cost to provide the service you're receiving).

BOFH: Nobody would be stupid enough to go live with the mirror system, surely

Oh. Well. Color us surprised

Color??

Is nothing sacred anymore.

Microsoft gives Windows laggards the 'gift of time' wrapped in licensing fees

Remember, MS ran just fine when it sold software with 5 years of feature updates and 10 years of security updates included.

Hang on... this story is about Server 2016... which seems to have had nearly 10 years of security updates included?? (it's 2026 now?)

Remember, MS ran just fine when it sold software with 5 years of feature updates and 10 years of security updates included.

You mean like in the NT4 days?

NT4 workstation sold for over $300, the upgrade was over $100.

NT4 server was over $1000 for a 10 client licence, or over $500 for upgrades.

Or the 2K days?

Win2K, retail over $400, upgrades from NT4 for around $150, and WIn 95/98 for around $200. Server came in at $1000 for a 5 user licence, with advanced server at $4000.

Surely it got better by XP?

$199 for the home edition (upgrades $99), $299 for the professional edition ($199 upgrade). Server had diverged at that point, but server 2003 was $999 for 5 client licences, and $3999 for the enterprise version with 25 client licences.

Also, remember everything in those days was 'on device'. You didn't get automatic updates or evolving threats that your machines were exposed to. Now we all expect timely security updates delivered automatically.

I don't like MSs advertising (hence me using server at home), but I do understand it's the cost of getting things 'for free'.

Do you have any evidence of this?

The linked Wikipedia article quite clearly says:

These games were distributed on 5+1⁄4" or, later, 3+1⁄2", floppy disks that booted directly, meaning once they were inserted in the drive and the computer was turned on

Also, I was at school in the 90s, and CDs were still very new even then.

It seems the first game released on CD was in 1988.

Maybe you're remembering booting floppies, not CDs?

Windows 11 is far worse than anything we dealt with in the 90's or 2000's.

In what way? It's more reliable than the 9x series of OSs. It also cost me nothing to buy, although I do pay with my personal information.

You can still pay for an OS from MS, and you don't get all the data slurping stuff.

I do this, I run Server 2025 at home (15 quid for a 3 licence VLK key; still cheaper than it would've been in the 90s/2000s) as I was so piss sick of the advertising in 11. But I do this knowing what I signed up for when I took my free download of 10 and 11. I didn't suddently think MS had become all benevolent. I recognise the work has to be funded somehow.

Back then they were just monopolists who wrote shitty code. Now they're data thieves and advertisers.

Wow!

We have different scales of what is right and wrong.

They're not thieves BTW, you agreed to the Ts and Cs. (You may not like them, but you could just not use their stuff).

Microsoft is giving Windows customers the "gift of time" but expects compensation for its generosity.

Or... Microsoft is a business. They expect to be paid for their output.

Microsoft made plenty of noise about the end of Windows 10 support last year. The Windows Server 2016 deadline has crept up more quietly, yet administrators who need breathing room to plan a migration will welcome the extra years, even at a price.

Microsoft made noises about Windows 10 as it's a consumer product, and (not unreasonably) product lifecycles aren't something that consumers really care about.

If you're using a piece of software, especially a critical piece of software like an operating system, in a corporate environment and you're not well aware of things like support lifecycles then you probably have other problems to solve first.

I get that MS is the bad guy (although I actually lived through the 90s when they really were), but seriously, in a corporate world if you're caught out by something like an OS reaching the end of it's supported life (and not learnt from the last time this happened), then I have little sympathy.

SerpApi says Google is the pot calling the kettle black when it comes to scraping

Re: Even though it’s Google, SerpApi deserve to lose

They're not ignoring it, they're claiming they didn't do that.

They're arguing that they interacted with the technical measure in a way that tricked it into showing content. This, they argue, isn't avoiding or bypassing it. It's fooling it.

Anthropic wants comp-sci students to vibe code their way through college

Re: So what are they going to learn?

I'm not sure that's what the study shows, although it seems to be the conclusion that the researchers drew.

They gave people a coding task they were unfamiliar with, half were given the use of AI assistants. The speed between the two groups was basically the same however the comprehension rate for the AI group was lower, which was used as a basis for this conclusion.

However, you've not asked people to learn a skill, you've asked them to do a task, and then given them different tools to do the job. If one tool requires a deeper understanding then of course you're going to end up with people comprehending the subject matter more.

UML.... Please no.... I can still feel the talons of those crow's feet clawing at my very soul......

Contain your Windows apps inside Linux Windows

RDP was Microsoft's answer to X11,

RDP was Citrix's answer to X11 (although unlike X11 at the time it's fairly usable over a network). They later licensed the tech back to MS, which became Terminal Services.

OK, so Anthropic's AI built a C compiler. That don't impress me much

Re: Worrying report on BBC about orchids vibe

We live in a world where the internet is full of:

"To do this thing run: curl https://exampe.com/mynotatalldodgyscript.sh | sh".

I'm not sure AI makes that any worse. People will do things they don't understand to get the things they want anyway.

Re: Exactly on point

This is not 'next gen', this is just open fraud.

No, it's just a company showing a use case for it's product that paints it in an unrealistic light. See: Every sales pitch ever.

Unfortunately due to "AI" it gets far more press than it should.

Summoning the spirit of the BBC Micro with a Pi 500+ and a can of spray paint

Re: Cheaper to get an original Beeb

If you're repairing one, or just want to test if an old machine works, a small 10" LCD designed for the CCTV market can be had off of the eBay. These have HDMI/VGA/BNC and RCA composite inputs.

Something like this. Picture quality is awful, but I've plugged both BBCs and Amigas into them without issue.

Microsoft actually does something useful, adds Sysmon to Windows

Re: Another thing MS should have done earlier...

Because it's a complex change to a fundamental system.

MS may not be great at testing random consumer Windows patches, but they are a large software company, and I think they take the core architecture of Serve quite seriously.

Something as low level as this should take a few years to roll out, if not you've not tested it enough.

Aside: It's this attitude that saved them with the Vista/Longhorn debacle. The consumer windows team had got very good at just chucking stuff in. The sever team weren't having this amount of untested code added to their OS so they ended up forking into consumer and server. This happened just after Win 2K.

When that all went to shit the fact they had a stable branch that had become Server 2003 meant they had a reasonable source code base to start again from.

Now, you could argue that 20 years on they've forgotten this lesson on the consumer side. :)

See Dave Plumbers interview with Dave Cutler for more details, the longhorn stuff is here.

perhaps a sign it's taking user needs more seriously than shareholder demands.

If you don't think short term, these two things should go hand in hand.

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

You also have to have chips to put up there too.

Current smallest node that is radiation hardened seems to be around 12nm, whereas nVidia's Blackwell GPU are on TMSCs 5nm process.

Re: I idly wonder

Obligatory what if?

Help! Does anyone on the bus know Linux?

Re: Obviousy a dual booting system...

I had Windows update bork Windows the other week.

I dual boot server and 11... (the 11 is being replaced but I occasionally need to boot back in to it)... a windows update cheerfully 'removed' the server startup option menu and put the graphical one from Windows 11 back in there for me. Oh, and set Win 11 to the default again.

Cheers MS.

Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year

Re: Sinking feeling

Unless he delivers real soon he'll find Tesla slipping from his fingers.

You say that... but Tesla has been vastly overvalued for several years now.

The cars that were once revolutionary are years out of date. They made no effort to refresh their line up despite being a 'car company'.

Yet the investors keep the price up, and seem happy to pay their dear leader billions in compensation.

We're about a year away from Musk appearing naked I reckon.

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

Re: Sounds awful

Yeah, we used to work with Perot systems too. :(

Debian's FreedomBox Blend promises an easier home cloud

Re: Desktops?

That seems a very opinionated choice of desktop to offer!

It's for non technical people. Opinionated is good. The people it's aimed at aren't equipped to have opinions about this as they're not subject matter experts.

Trump promises nuclear datacenter permits in 3 weeks, calls Greenland 'big beautiful ice'

Re: For someone who apparently doesn't like communism....

Do you prefer to have Russians as your enemies, think before you answer ?

If your answer is yes, go ask the Ukranians he they feel about that.

As an adult I recognise the world isn't divided into choice A and choice B.

Re: TACO time

The other problem is business deals aren't the same as politics.

In business (as with Trump) it's all about money. Politics should be about people.

Thing is, like Trump says, people remember, and a lot of the people he's annoying are politicans. America may not be so happy with Trump in 15 to 30 years when the rest of the world has moved on and the American cultural empire is but a memory.

(This assumes he doesn't go for a wild power grab after losing the midterms).

Just because Linus Torvalds vibe codes doesn't mean it's a good idea

Re: Synthetic Take: Why Vibe Coding Isn’t “Just for Toys”

Understanding is the part of programming that matters.

Yes. That was my point. :)

But do you understand 100% of the codebase you work on? I don't.. I understand the bits I'm responsible for and know that I can understand the rest if needed. (It's a large project).

However if you perform that rigour with code reviews then the source of the code shouldn't matter, AI or other dev.

Your prototype should not have any 'slop' in it.

Re-reading your comment again, maybe it's just what we classify as 'prototypes'... I've been burnt by prototypes being productionised before, so any 'prototype' I am involved in is written as though it's going to be productionised.

Re: Synthetic Take: Why Vibe Coding Isn’t “Just for Toys”

but it is even more important that a vibrototype is discarded because you cannot risk having any code you do not fully understand in a production code base.

Why are you not reviewing your AI generated code with the same rigor you review your human generated code?

Can you honestly say you fully understand 100% of your human generated code? I can't.

It's much worse than that. Just because a program runs doesn't mean it's good. As Ruth Suehle, President of the Apache Software Foundation, commented recently on LinkedIn, naive vibe coders "only know whether the output works or doesn't and don't have the skills to evaluate it past that. The potential results are horrifying."

Because all that code out there in businesses written by naive coders is so so much better??

AI is a tool... use the tool correctly and it can help. Use it badly and you'll get the same results as a room full of cheap but not very skilled devs.

Throwing bodies at rapid development without enough skilled developers to keep on top of all the code being written sn't a new problem. AI just automates it.

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

Re: Bollocks. Utter bollocks

No, it's because people use it.

You or I may not, but 'asking ChatGPT' is for many people the new googling.

I asked one of my work colleagues the other day what their plans for a feature were, their response was 'I'll ask Claude'.

My cynicism wasn't helped though, as at the end of the day I was writing a ticket for a change to our CI/CD pipeline. As I know it'll just get chucked at AI I did that myself to check the description was verbose enough.

45 minutes later it's committing the changes to a branch as the ones it suggested were as good as they would've been if a dev had written them. In fact, in terms of documentation and structure probably much better than the slightly hacky job I would've done myself. Total cost according to Claude was about $0.45 plus an hour of my time. (I expect that same AI usage cost in a year or two to be magnitudes greater).

Mind you, I still don't get 'asking ChatGPT'... I'm a dev by trade, I can look at the output of Claude and see what it's doing; or if it recommends a library I can check that out. But if I ask ChatGPT a question I still have to check it's not just making stuff up. This still seems harder to me than just googling.

AI is spectacularly successful in terms of user numbers if not profitability

"Hey Alexa, tell me about the business model around smart assistants again and how that's going for you all..."

Wine 11 runs Windows apps in Linux and macOS better than ever

Re: What?

I genuinely don't know who you're saying is out of touch here.

Re: What?

Talk about staying in your bubble.

You understand the bubble puts food on their table?

Can you explain how they leave that bubble? That might be more helpful.

So, here's the scenario... I run a business, what I do isn't important, just that it's not 'selling Linux'. (i.e. the choice of computing platform isn't relevant to the work I do). I however decide I want to move to Linux because MS is a data grabbing whore.

How do I go about that? I need to interact with the Word and Excel documents that my paying clients and I exchange between us.

How do I make it painless and acceptable for my clients to do this?

Lets say, for argument that my business has a broad spectrum of clients, which I can classify as 2 basic types. There's the small 1 person type outfits, who just buy a computer with an office subscription. How do I broach the re-training they'll require to switch to Libreoffice. (Assuming they're not computer professionals and they view their computer as a business tool)? What tangible benefits will the cost outlay offer them? (Again, they're not computer people so I'm unlikely to be able to use the FOSS argument).

What about the other larger clients, to whom I'm just one of many many business relationships. How do I broach the topic with them? Do I have ways to suggest they can just use Libreoffice with me or will I take the pain of taking their MS documents and making them work? (both ways? And if so, how do I actually do that?)

Who pays for this re-training? Do I offer discounts? How much? How do I ensure my clients don't get annoyed and look elsewhere?

Re: What?

I think you've entirely highlighted the problem.

It's one of perception, people see it as right/wrong blame thing.

It's no-ones 'fault' that Word or Excel are hard to replicate. It's because they're 30+ year old pieces of software who's maker has no commercial incentive to make them interoperable.

Unless you can persuade someone with government level powers that interoperability has become so vital to business that MS must work to make them compatible it won't happen.

This nearly happened in the early 2000s.... nearly.

These days though, despite MS still having the desktop monopoly they had in the 90s the world has moved on and no one that can do anything cares.

Moon hotel startup hopes you get lunar lunacy, drop $1M deposit for 2032 stay

Re: Churlish

Yes

Really?

To quote your post: "OTOH a lot of rich idiots might get blown up on the pad (https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/01/14/isro_pslv_mission_fail/) so there is at least a potential upside."

It seems like you're saying the potential of 'a lot' of people getting 'blown up' on the pad is a 'potential upside'.

What did you actually mean by this?

Re: Churlish

I may have misunderstood your comment, but it seems like you're saying:

"It won't happen... but on the upside some people might die."

Have I misunderstood?

Linus Torvalds tries vibe coding, world still intact somehow

We've just started a re-write of some software where I work.

We've been using AI to write a lot of it, and I've been very surprised at the results. We have AI helping write the UI and also writing tickets and working on tickets too.

All this is then reviewed by humans first, but the quality of the output is surprisingly good.

The reason this works for us is it's a business app, to solve a business function, so like most applications it's a core processing engine then a lot of UI and validation around the inputs and process flow.

Humans designed (and largely implemented) the complex calculation engine at the center of it, but the rest is UI, validation, process flow and legislative compliance. Being able to use AI to iterate on that kind of stuff has been a real boon. It's not writing it all, but with guidance from developers it is doing a lot of the boilerplate work, and it's doing it well.

As the project progresses from implementation to maintenance and improvement I expect the work done by the AI to be reduced, but for cranking out the 'verbose but not that complex' UI and boilerplate code it's been fascinating.

For example we need to finish tying up the UI to the back end, AI was fed with a broad overview of what we wanted, and has access to the code. It was tasked with creating a list of the work that needed to be done and told to generate tickets for them.

It did, then someone went through each ticket to check it. This is a much easier process than writing them from scratch, and it also occasionally uncovers something that would get missed by a human as the reviewer is forced to think about what the AI has written, so it makes them visualize the problem more.

Just to be clear here AI is very much a tool. The project is being written by a good team of experienced developers. There is no way the project could have been written with some junior developers and AI, the competent people in the loop are required, but being able to direct an overall design whilst not have to worry about writing every last detail has been really quite useful. Being able to design a UI and have AI write a good chunk of it using our standardized components has been useful. This is especially useful for the product owner and the UI designer, as they can iterate on a semi-functional UI without needing a developer in the loop. So they can quickly get to something that works as expected, but then is handed over to a dev to tidy up.

At the end of the day as a developer I'm much better suited to be solving complex problems rather than writing boilerplate code. If that can be automated by a tool then why not.

Court tosses appeal by hacker who opened port to coke smugglers with malware

Re: Boo hoo

Yet again, another example of proper law enforcement being used to catch criminals.

Now, remind me why I need all my digital transactions undermined by breakable encryption?

Seems like it's possible to catch criminals without that??

AI and automation could erase 10.4 million US roles by 2030

"Where our earlier forecast saw just 29 percent of US jobs lost to automation coming from GenAI, that number is now 50 percent, which accounts for agentic AI solutions that leverage GenAI as well."

I shall assume your current forecasts are made with as much insight as the previous ones and treat them as such.

I mean if you failed to predict that AI would evolve in the way it has just 2 years ago what faith should I have in your current emissions?

I predict that when a disruptive change in the workforce happens, just like previous changes, we'll discover a whole new class of jobs that people can be paid to do.

Microsoft euthanizes ancient deployment toolkit

Microsoft has abruptly pulled the plug on the venerable Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT), sending any administrators still clinging to the platform scrambling for alternatives.[...]

MDT has survived for many years[...] It has, however, been on the chopping block for some time. Microsoft announced deprecation in December 2024,

Abruptly? I do not think that word means what you think it does.

Cloudflare CEO threatens to make the Winter Olympics a political football after Italy slugs it with a fine

Re: this is what is missing from the Holier Tha Thou types...

Just be careful you don't end up on the opposite side.

Defending the use of words that some people clearly find offensive, despite your immediate social circle not at all caring more than the effort it would take to simply learn not to use it.

I've met people who will defend their use of 'master/slave' for example, Whereas most people just go 'fair enough..' and get on with their lives. There's the occasional misuse but it quickly becomes second nature. (I find 'master' jarring when I see it as a branch name now).

I don't think it really offended anyone, but I'm not going to argue that to death as there's billions of people on this planet and I can't survey them all, there's much more important things in life.

(We're all still getting used to this global conversation the internet lets us have).

Or to put it another way.... every one of us has something we find offensive that a large group of people won't, if you'd like people to take that into account you have to occasionally give in to the nonsense. (Either that or remove 'nonce' from every cryptographic paper out there).

What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

Re: The last thing we want

Why?

The bubble around computers in the home has largely passed. (People with computers at home tend to have them because they're into computers, whereas most people now use their phones or tablets for the kind of tasks they would've had a PC for in the early 2000s).

Most PCs these days are in offices, and the one piece of software in the MS office suite that hasn't been suitably replicated yet is Excel.

I don't mean Excel that you or I would use it for, I mean Excel when it's used by someone who can't program but has a complex idea they need to realize.

We often see stories of people running weird shit in Excel on these pages. They're the crazy spreadsheets you see because they're interesting, but there's many many equally as complicated ones running businesses out there.

For a lot of businesses if you can say with 100% confidence that their spreadsheets will continue to work I think you'd find more uptake.