Posts by captain veg

Microsoft revives DOS-era Edit in a modern shell

Re: a bit of a bloater

Well, the version in DOS was not completely standalone. It was basically a wrapper for the code editor in QBasic.

I have to say that I preferred its white text on blue background to the new effort's obligatory dark theme.

-A.

Microsoft adds Grok – the most unhinged chatbot – to Azure AI buffet

Re: "he was not a farmer but ran a mine until last month"

Kill the boor!

-A.

Re: "he was not a farmer but ran a mine until last month"

Kill the boar!

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Re: Grok (the AI) doesn't understand anything at all

C.f. Tesla "autopilot".

-A.

Re: Mercia clay/mudstone

Not sloppy enough?

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Virgin Media O2 patches hole that let callers snoop on your coordinates

Re: Big difference

Parking.

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Some English hospitals doubt Palantir's utility: We'd 'lose functionality rather than gain it'

Re: No!

I took my aging parents for a ride on the little yellow train in the French pyrenees. My mother can't walk for any distance, let alone up a mountain, so I thought it would be a good way to see some of the scenery, and so it proved. But fast it isn't. After a couple of hours, mum needed to use the loo. At the next stop we went off to find one. Passing the train driver I mentioned where we were going. He assured us that he would wait for us to return before setting off again.

On the way back the line was blocked by a lorry-load of felled trees accidentally deposited on a level crossing, so bus replacement had to be organised at short notice. It was nearly midnight by the time we got back.

-A.

Next week's SpaceX Starship test still needs FAA authorization

Re: According to some

> its called "pogo'ing"

That was my thought too. Followed swiftly by "isn't this a solved problem?" Like, back in the 1960s.

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"an energetic event in the aft portion of Starship."

Er, isn't that how rockets work?

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Microsoft blows deadline for special Azure for EU hosters

low-ball

"The Reg warned early in April, sources told us it was inevitable Microsoft would miss the agreed deadline as it had low-balled the engineering work involved."

Seems to me this is simply a dispute over pricing. No engineering required.

-A.

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

Serious Cybernetics

Way back in the 1980s I worked for a bit in a office boasting, among the VT220 dumb terminals, a sole MS-DOS PC that was used to run Lotus 1-2-3. It was branded Victor Sirius.

If anyone in the office ever demanded "are you serious?" the reply was inevitably "no, I'm Victor".

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Re: not so great for a casual user, grandpa and grandma

I'm old enough to be a grandpa. I use Linux.

OK, I'm somewhat technically savvy. My octogenarian dad, on the other hand, struggles even with the notions of files and folders, and yet he too uses Linux (Mint) on his desktop, no problem whatsoever. In fact it works for him much better than any version of Windows that he used previously.

-A.

Ivanti patches two zero-days under active attack as intel agency warns customers

lol

"As long as customers secure their IIS website"

Presumably by not making it available to the public internet.

-A.

Fedora 42 now an official Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 distro

Re: way out of line here, but...

They'd better remember to bring a 27B/6.

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Re: way out of line here, but...

> the whole concept of loading Windows to run Linux is bloody absurd

Well, I don't do that. The opposite, in fact. Sorry for being unclear.

I can only do this because I live outside the corporate IT system to the greatest extent possible, largely at my own expense. My colleagues, using machines "provisioned" by Central Services, are only allowed Windows or macOS. If they beg in the right way then they might be allowed to install Linux in a VM. The permission is likely to be revoked arbitrarily.

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way out of line here, but...

... seems to me that the only real justification for using WSL is to create Docker images for DotNet apps, which generally (so far as I can tell) use Alpine Linux. Otherwise just run a Linux VM in Windows, or, better, vice-versa. That's what I do (the vice-versa) using VirtualBox. It works well.

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Boffins warn that AI paper mills are swamping science with garbage studies

conflation

The article specifically mentions LLMs and then goes on to generalise that to AI.

I'm prepared to entertain the possibility that there might be application-specific varieties of AI that could help alleviate some of the grunt work in medical research. I understand that good results have been obtained in X-ray image analysis, for example. But so far as I can tell the only real use of LLMs is to quickly produce plausible text unhindered by resemblance to facts. This is bad news for software code, utterly fatal to scientific research.

-A.

Apple exec sends Google shares plunging as he calls AI the new search

Re: Wrong assumption.

> search for "DuckDuckGo."

Been using it for several years. For a while it was great.

It's definitely getting worse. I sometimes have to go back to Google or, more often, Startpage, to get a sensible answer.

No matter what my search terms, somewhere near the end of the first page will be links to hotels or tourist attractions near to where I happen to be, but having precisely nothing to do with what I searched for. Kindly fuck off with your "relevance" algorithm and just give me what I asked for.

If I put my search terms in quotation marks it tells me that nothing matches. Nothing. Despite my having a web page containing exactly that text open in front of me

DDG was nice. It's just the same shit now. I notice that they're advertising on the telly. Figures.

-A.

great teaching tool

Where to start?

Gen AI is not a great anything tool, let alone teaching, unless your objective is to teach unquestioning acceptance of what it tells you, plausible but wrong. Which is, just about always, a mistake.

In my childhood I learned pretty quickly that my parents didn't know the answers to my homework. Even in junior school. So it was all down to me.

Seems that you are similarly unable to help your kids cheat the learning process.

Good.

Suggesting to them that Gen AI is some kind of shortcut is, in my view, child abuse.

-A.

OS-busting bug so bad that Microsoft blocks Windows Insider release

Re: I wonder what it is

Brown screen of death?

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Feeling dumb? Let Google's latest AI invention simplify that wordy writing for you

Define "simple"

I'm put in mind of something I recall reading about the 1950s Raleigh RM-1 mo-ped. Keen to diversify and get on the contemporary mo-ped craze the company did its market research and determined that potential customers were after simplicity. Of course what they really meant was easy to use. The engineers interpreted this as mechanical simplicity and produced a machine with no gearbox and no clutch. It was virtually impossible to ride.

-A.

‘Infuriated’, ‘disappointed' ... Ex-VMware customers explain why they migrated to Nutanix

Re: "software-defined storage is superior"

Seems deeply ironic to me, given that for some years VMWare was part of EMC.

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The 12 KB that Windows just can't seem to quit

Re: Coconut Team Fortress 2 moment.

I've no idea what this Coconut Team Fortress 2 thing is, but I'd guess it is some kind of game. I would further surmise that the coconut.jpg file has some kind of anti-privacy ID steganographised into it.

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Microsoft moved the goalposts once. Will Windows 12 bring another shift?

Re: Security scares

> after so many decades of security scares people have become accustomed to updating their operating system

Maybe so, but Windows 10 rams the updates up your fundament whether you want them or not. Maybe that conditions people's expectations.

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Re: Reasonable expectations

I would imagine that most consumers would reasonably expect that the consumer-electronics device they'd bought would work correctly during its lifetime, and that if it did not then the manufacturer would fix it at their expense. Security fixes only arise because of defects in the product. Microsoft cannot claim that the only resolution is to "upgrade" (even if for free) to a new version which won't actually install.

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Re: the problem

I chose my words quite carefully.

The "many people" I had in mind were those who bought a PC with Windows pre-installed, which is just about all of them, and had a reasonable expectation that it would continue working as long as the PC did.

I'm not talking about the likes of you and me. I got off the Windows treadmill many years ago.

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the problem

The problem certainly is not the hardware "requirements" for Win11, no matter how specious.

The problem is ending support for Win10 and offering no other route out, essentially bricking many people's devices. The fact that Microsoft told us that this would never happen as part of their drive to get everyone off Win7 just rubs the salt in.

-A.

You'll never guess which mobile browser is the worst for data collection

Re: Legality

Ah. *MY* contact details. I understood it to mean details of my contacts, i.e. the content of my address book.

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Re: I use Brave

I used to use Brave when I was stuck on Android. It seemed OK.

These days it's Sapot, mostly.

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Legality

So Chrome collects contact data?

How would that fit with GDPR? So far as I know, none of my contacts consented to that.

-A.

30 years of MySQL, the database that changed the world

Re: Naming of MariaDB

I wasn't aware that Ian's thingy had anything to do with it.

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Re: Datatabases, or datadumps?

> you simply cannot implement ACID integrity in the application layer.

Sure you can. The application layer is just software. So is the database manager.

I grew up in Pick, which is, in brief, a hash-based key-data store of semi-structured data on disk. It has dictionaries, and you can use them to specify expected relationships, which aids reporting but in no way at all constrain the actual table content. Just about the only enforced integrity rule is that keys are unique.

This taught me pretty quickly how to write application code which ensured data integrity*.

Many years later I'm walking through some code and the boss notices that I haven't set the database (er, Microsoft Access) to enforce referential integrity. I said that I didn't need that overhead. He said let's see and turned it on, expecting a flood of errors. There were none.

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* Maybe I'm thick, but I fail to see how writing application code that is aware of the integrity rules is any better than catching and dealing with the exceptions that might result from breaching them.

Citrix finds new use for virtualization: Avoiding PC price hikes caused by tariffs

Mate, there seems to be something wrong with your Shift and space keys. Among others. Suggest a new keyboard.

-A.

Microsoft updates the Windows 11 Start Menu

Re: Take my hat off to MS

Thanks for that. Will investigate those options.

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Re: Take my hat off to MS

I'd like to be able to easily -- like trivially -- open a remote desktop on my phone, over USB or WiFi, so that I can do phone stuff without the pain of a (relatively) tiny screen and virtual keyboard.

When I'm out and about the ability to do computer-y stuff, especially online, using a device that I can whip of of a pocket is compelling. When I'm back home I'd like to be able to operate the same device using a proper screen, keyboard and mouse, if only to configure the damn thing and install software on it.

I guess I must be odd, or this would be standard.

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Curl project founder snaps over deluge of time-sucking AI slop bug reports

Re: It's the bug bounty

Other's have (below) suggested possible mechanisms. But that's entirely beside the point. Offering reward for doing good ought to be balanced by some kind of penalty for taking the piss. Call it "moral hazard", if you like.

Let's be creative.

When you submit a report you make a punt on how real and/or severe it is by laying a stake. Instead of a flat bounty, they pay out some multiple of your stake. If it turns out to be a waste of time then you lose your stake.

I'm sure you could come up with something better.

-A.

Re: It's the bug bounty

How about issuing fines for "plausible but wrong" reports?

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Altman's eyeball-scanning biometric blockchain orbs officially come to America

Re: "free money is free money"

And even then, it's not real money, and it's not free.

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KDE 3 lives to fight another day as Trinity Desktop 14.1.4 hits the shelves

Nostalgia

Those screen grabs bring it all back!

SuSE (not sure exactly which version, but pre-Novell) was my first Linux daily driver. Before that I'd dabbled in Slack and Red Hat. I quite liked RPM, but Gnome annoyed the hell out of me. SuSE (as it was styled) had RPM, added the still-wonderful YaST and a desktop that didn't look like it had been crayoned by a child. Welcome to KDE. This was good enough to wipe the disk and install without the crutch of Windows dual boot.

In the end it was the seeming inability of YoU to perform an in-place upgrade with losing non-essential stuff like, er, the GUI and networking, that made me jump first to Lubuntu and then to Mint (Cinnamon or Mate depending on the hardware). And that's great, thanks.

Still, a few years ago I grabbed a Pine64 notebook that came pre-installed with Neon. An interesting choice given the less than stellar hardware specs, but, when it worked, an absolute joy to be back in KDE. I reckon it would have been blinding with Trinity.

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Microsoft to preload Word minutes after boot

> what's the point of being in on time?

I wouldn't know.

Back in the days when physical office presenteeism was expected I used to leave my work computer on all the time and VPN in to it shortly after the morning existential battle with the bed force was, er, won. Since COVID no one expects me to be in any particular geographical location.

-A.

Linux in Excel? Sure, why not ruin both

Re: VBA

The first time I saw Excel it launched from DOS and brought in its own private Windows 2 runtime.

Yep, definitely disappointing that this effort doesn't emulate a system in VBA, which is surely possible, though there are definitely hoops to negotiate, like the lack of unsigned integers and bit-shifting operations. I wonder which is the simplest Linux-compatible ISA to emulate?

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Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

Re: I'll believe it when I see it.

"Europeans are very very good at bellyaching, and fucking useless at doing."

What, *all" of us? Would you be generalising, by any chance?

"But hey, it's "cheaper" to shovel $$$ to MS, so why would we do that ?"

It's certainly "cheaper" when Microsoft deploys its huge cash mountain in slush funds, yes. But we live in an age where senior American politicians prefer WhatsApp to secure military alternatives.

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AI training license will allow LLM builders to pay for content they consume

Re: Ignored

The tech giants and their financiers don't give the slightest micropoo about legality just so long as they can establish a monopoly to exploit before (and if) it's banned. By which time, by definition, there's no competition to step into the gap.

This is how 21st century capitalism works. Suck it up.

-A.

Re: How much would a LLM training cost?

> LLMs need everything they can get their hands on.

Well, that helps fulfill the woeful objective of "plausible but wrong".

To be actually useful LLMs have to produce output that is better than mediocre. I don't see how swallowing the entire internet -- have you seen what's on the internet?* -- and regurgitating it wholesale can ever do that. Training only on high quality data would be an improvement, but throws up obvious problems for the parasites trying to exploit this stuff.

But in any case, is this really what we expect from Artificial Intelligence, that the very best it can do is parrot the data that it was trained upon? Hardly progress, is it?

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* A joke, but, well, have you?

Re: Times change, laggards are left by the wayside

> My estimate is that 90% of all books in a book laden household are second hand.

Is it?

I have many hundreds of books. I can't think of a single one which was bought second hand.

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Build your own antisocial writing rig with DOS and a $2 USB key

Kernit can handle external communication

Gosh, thanks for that. I'd forgotten that I used to live on Kermit, for a time, back when 1200 baud was cutting edge.

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DOS 7, 7.1, 8

"After Microsoft launched Windows 95, it lost interest in MS-DOS"

I might be reading that wrong, but it seems to gloss over the fact that Windows 95 through ME all booted in to DOS and relied upon it for some core functionality (e.g. reading the RTC). It's true that Microsoft did a largely successful job of hiding its ugly underbelly, but it was always there, and you could even create a bootable DOS floppy from the command prompt. I did this at the time in order to run the Microprose Grand Prix 2 game.

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Devs sound alarm after Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks

Re: mad for VSC

In my case it was because Adobe withdrew Brackets and recommended moving to the conceptually very similar VS Code.

When Brackets came out it was something of a revelation -- an editor that actually understood JavaScript! (Until then I was using Windows WordPad.) I guess that's not such a unique selling point these days.

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Sceptic

I am, in general, sceptical of AI bullshit, especially when applied to coding. But the alarm bells were ringing loud when my younger AI-credulous colleagues started proselytising for Cursor. For some kind of reason it couldn't be installed as an add-in to VS-Code despite being a "fork" of same.

Now we know why.

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Microsoft mystery folder fix might need a fix of its own

Re: Quality control - yes we’ve heard of it

With respect, fuck your "modern OS".

We've never needed more than a scheduler, memory management and a file system.

Internet access is useful, though it introduces rather serious security concerns. Notwithstanding, being online by default ought, at least, make it easy to obtain graphical shells. Microsoft's "Presentation Manager" might be one of them.

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