* Posts by Richard 12

6031 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2009

Microsoft promises Copilot will be a 'moneymaker' in the long term

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Apparently....

So the business case for Copilot is proving that some (many? most?) meetings are pointless and should be cancelled?

That explains the "10 hours a week" claim!

Although once you've cut back your meetings to the ones that actually matter, why would you keep paying MS to attend them?

What strange beauty is this? Microsoft commits to two more non-subscription Office editions

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Huh?

Also, only five years.

FIVE YEARS!!??

It takes two to three years just to get certification in those markets, let alone develop a product.

The existing ten year supply guarantees are already the shortest most industrial and medical device manufacturers can cope with and still meet their legal obligations.

You'd have to start the upgrade and recertification process for the next version a year or two before MS admitted the next version exists.

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

Richard 12 Silver badge

Have to actually catch them first, and prove it in court.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Panels and battery?

Solar PV probably needs planning permission, given the description of the location.

There have been several cases of people installing solar panels and being forced to remove them because the site doesn't have permitted development rights.

A "portable" generator set doesn't need planning or permitted development.

I think the figures are wrong though, £70 of (road) diesel is about 45 litres, or about 150kWh. Red diesel would be far more. That's a really huge daily consumption!

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Non-Redundant Redundancy

Penalties are irrelevant.

The chance of a miscreant actually being caught and prosecuted is almost zero, and they know this.

Qualcomm unveils Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 with Eye-of-Sauron camera

Richard 12 Silver badge

Uncrop?

I can't wait for all the new problems that's going to cause.

The Royal PR team must absolutely love that idea, so many new footguns for them to enjoy.

McDonald's ordering system suffers McFlurry of tech troubles

Richard 12 Silver badge

Their app is abysmal

I've yet to have it start in under two minutes. Five is common.

No idea WTF it's trying to do in that time.

NASA missions are being delayed by oversubscribed, overburdened, and out-of-date supercomputers

Richard 12 Silver badge

Probably not

As NASA generally need answers to far higher precision than the half float (or less) that most GPUs are effective at.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Unknown scheduling practices or assumed higher costs

Of course they do, because the central storage system is not fit for purpose.

Not because of the technology or the support, but because the way it is administered is totally incompatible with the way it is actually funded.

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Just a thought

You can use a finite number of monkeys if you set your sights a little lower.

Sure, you probably won't get Shakespeare, but maybe Twilight?

How to Netflix Oracle’s blockbuster audit model

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Thank you Reg...

They don't, though.

There have been multiple studies showing that executives who receive large rewards generally cause all other shareholders investments to lose value.

Share awards diluting the value of existing shares, bad acquisitions, and of course the simple extraction of $100,000,000 or more every year.

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Yet

There's a big difference between "going equipped" and a mouse having a nibble.

A lot of these installations aren't protected against the local wildlife.

Or against a light rain and gentle breeze, in some cases.

Plummer talks to us about spending Microsoft's money on a red Corvette

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: FQUtube

It clearly has several O(n^2) or worse. Simply listing the contents of a Zip with a few thousand files takes many tens of seconds on modern hardware.

JetBrains TeamCity under attack by ransomware thugs after disclosure mess

Richard 12 Silver badge

Well, no

We don't have an alternative universe where JetBrains could quietly pretend nothing important was in the patch, apply it whenever - while miscreants (continue to) attack the holes thus silently disclosed.

So we cannot compare whether this universe is better or worse.

The security industry seems to have a pretty clear consensus that Jetbrains were wrong though. People don't update unless they are basically forced to (Microsoft/Apple approach), or the release notes indicates Really Bad Juju if you don't.

So a quiet security patch is bad. Users will simply ignore it for a very long time, while miscreants will not.

Lawsuit claims gift card fraud is the gift that keeps on giving, to Google

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: To sum up ...

Google Play is only about 20% of the gift card scam market.

What's the rest?

How big is the Apple gift card scam market now that it's been a few years since they settled? Have they done anything the court can point to and tell Google to do as well?

Or did they do nothing, thus telling Google to do nothing?

What a surprise! Apple found a way to deliver browser engine and app store choice

Richard 12 Silver badge
Facepalm

I see the blind fanboys are out already

The option to use another store is just that, an option.

I suppose you also think that Walmart should be the only store in town, and all the others should close?

Ahead of Super Tuesday, US elections face existential and homegrown threats

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: The two biggest threats...

"Proactively" going for it...

Anyone who is that keen to be President should never, ever, under any circumstances be allowed the title.

The Framers were very explicit.

Hold up world, HP's all-in-one print subscription's about to land, and don't forget AI PCs

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: a good majority of users will simply beat a path to their door

Unlike Microsoft, HP do not have an effective monopoly.

If the printer in the (mostly empty) office changed from one beige box to another, nobody cares. Or even notices.

That said, a lot of corporates have always rented their printers so perhaps HP are safe to do that.

The batteries on Odysseus, the hero private Moon lander, have run out

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: "Our now proven robust lunar program"

Space is hard.

They say that any landing you can walk away from is a good one.

While it broke at least one leg and fell over, it did still work afterwards so that counts as "good". Not in any way "robust", though.

Though I really hope they've learned that landing livestreams need to show real telemetry, like everyone else does. Animations are pointless during landing unless they're driven by real telemetry, so either do that or just show the raw displays.

And the presenters need some actual prepared segments and a crib sheet of what various calls actually mean, instead of talking over the mission controllers to say "that's a good call".

This was an historic occasion, inane banter is just plain silly.

Plans to heat districts with datacenters may prove too hot to handle

Richard 12 Silver badge

Regulations vary, some places say 60C, others 55C.

Either way, it's considerably hotter than any reasonable datacentre "warm" output flow temp would be by the time it reaches a heat customer.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Retrofitting is incredibly expensive.

District and communal heating systems need hot water (or steam) pipes in the ground between the bit that makes the hot and the places that need heating.

The places that need heating need a connection to the trunk - more underground pipework - and a heat exchanger.

Datacentre heat is fairly low-grade, so the homes may also need heat pumps to raise the flow temperature and/or be otherwise designed to be heated by low flow temperatures.

Hot washing water needs to be at least 55C, so they also need some way to generate that.

It's only really feasible if all the infrastructure is installed when the places are being built.

Lightweight Windows-like desktop LXQt makes leap to Qt 6 with version 2.0

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Can someone man'splain this to me?

"Fractional scaling" is something most of the "old farts" really want, even if they don't know it.

It's how you make the whole UI a bit bigger so failing eyes can still read the text.

Also, modern monitors have more dots per millimetre, so many people need this improved high and mixed DPI support to get the full benefit of their hardware.

There's quite a few other features "under the hood" that you probably want, too.

Qt have backported some of this into the "commercial" editions of 5.15, but most open source was otherwise stuck - some back on 5.12.

The annoyance is of course that said commercial-only exists, while 6.6 has still not reached feature parity with 5.15.16.

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

Richard 12 Silver badge

Powers and data must be limited for safety

Even if you trust your current government not to abuse data and powers, nobody can trust that no future government will ever decide that $attribute is unwanted and start rounding you up.

It's one of the utter insanities of the current Tory "government". They are continually and repeatedly trying to push through powers that the next Labour Government could use to literally lock them all up, or perhaps deport rather a lot of senior Conservatives to Rwanda.

Meanwhile, Trump is trying to give Biden total immunity for any crimes he might feel inclined to commit in the next few months.

Betting your life that nobody will ever abuse things you give them seems really stupid to me.

Apple's Titan(ic) iCar project is dead as self-driving dream fails to materialize

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: I don't get it

There are several special tax codes to "reward" companies for undertaking R&D activities.

Never underestimate the power of a fully-operational tax accountant.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: I don't get it

Apple have all the money, close enough.

They can afford to try pretty much anything and sink absolutely massive amounts into it, and it will cost them almost nothing at all because it simply reduces their tax bill.

I expect that they have several pie-in-the-sky projects that aren't expected to make any revenue but might possibly do so eventually, and it only costs them cashflow as they can write it all off against tax.

Texas judge turns out the lights on federal survey of cryptominers' energy consumption

Richard 12 Silver badge

This is literally the EIAs job

They exist to survey energy usage so that future public and private works can be planned.

They survey every group - including drivers and residential. There's hundreds of forms.

It seems that the cryptocurrency form has been temporarily taken down due to this lawsuit, but if it's anything like the Power Plant Report form then it takes half an hour the first time and under ten minutes every time thereafter. They probably spend longer deciding where to park in an empty lot.

- Unless the bitcoin company doesn't actually track energy usage at all, which seems unlikely as that is their major cost.

Their decision to file suit has almost certainly already cost them more than the survey for its entire 3 year run!

So one can only presume that they already know they're doing something they shouldn't be.

OpenAI claims New York Times paid someone to 'hack' ChatGPT

Richard 12 Silver badge

Not even that

We were caught stealing other people's stuff after we invited them to look around our house, but they looked in the cupboard where we keep our stolen stuff, so it doesn't count.

Cybercrims: When we hit IT, they sometimes pay, but when we hit OT... jackpot

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: What does OT stand for here?

So what's Operational Technology even mean?

Definitions would be nice. I'm sure there's a market segment that uses the term a lot, but our little corner of industrial machinery has never heard the term.

The self-created risk in Broadcom's big VMware kiss-off

Richard 12 Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Brilliant strategy?

Except they have basically no chance of actually getting that money.

When you increase prices that much, everyone leaves as fast as possible. Broadcom appears to be betting that it will take long enough for them to recover the acquisition costs.

It won't, because they've raised the price too far. Everyone knows you boil the frog slowly!

If you increase my costs by $200,000pa, then it is cheaper for me to hire someone permanently to deal with any limitations of an alternative than to pay the license fee. I'll save in the first quarter.

If you increase my costs by $50,000pa, then it is probably cheaper for me to pay a consultant to transition, as I'll be saving in a couple of years.

Of course, the execs who authorised all this will have already banked their bonuses and left. It does appear that the larger the corporation the shorter term its behaviour.

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Well, at least this reminded me to have a play

Basically, because whitespace is invisible, and is often not preserved.

Python is the only language I'm aware of that needs a "pass" statement, and that is purely and simply because of the limitation of meaningful whitespace - you cannot see where it ends.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Dream a Little Dream

Pretty much.

And it does actually work now, at least for MS Office from MS Office.

Not really for anything else, though, and I'm certain that it's actually a huge array of horrible workarounds all the way down.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: In the absence of files...

Removing the concept of "files and folders" tends to break the user's brain.

Take gmail, for example.

Gmail does not have folders, instead it has labels.

But nobody uses it that way. Almost everyone treats the labels as folders - and gets confused when an email thread has multiple labels.

This is probably because there is no physical analog. Folders are a physical box to put things in. I put the thing in box A, it's still in that box later. I move it to box B, it's not in box A anymore.

As a software engineer I'm perfectly happy with the concepts of pointers and references, but most people are not. In the industry I develop for we have entire training courses about referenced data, and yet there are still many users who simply don't understand.

And a fair few software engineers who struggle, too.

China breakthrough promises optical discs that store hundreds of terabytes

Richard 12 Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Missing important use cases

Archive cares about longevity and bits per volume, and has far higher budgets than any consumer format.

Tape is still king there, even though it's not been used anywhere else for many years.

If this optical storage can roughly match tape read and write speeds and meet or exceed longevity, then it has a significant market as it'll be physically smaller than the equivalent tape library.

Assuming it actually works, of course. A lab demo is not a product - though it may become one, given time and budget.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: 100 layers?

As I understand it, the 100 layers is a function of the heads, not the media. The media appears to be homogeneous.

So it's plausible to manufacture, although making a CD-sized disc sufficiently homogeneous throughout is a tough challenge.

Richard 12 Silver badge

The point is that it's an invalid comparison.

Compare the native. Everyone can compress, so the only important figure is the native.

50TB tape is available right now, 80TB has presumably been demonstrated. Beyond that is plausible but doesn't yet exist.

A path out of bloat: A Linux built for VMs

Richard 12 Silver badge

I think you're arguing about the definition of "user"

In a batch processing system, the users submit work and get the result back later, once their batch has been processed.

In an interactive system, users submit work and get the result back later, once they get their time slice.

The only real difference is the size of the time slice. IIRC, some batch processing mainframes used to limit the amount of time a single job was permitted, freezing it (and unloading the tape) if it took too long, continuing it later.

Early pre-emptive multitasking, I guess. Letting every batch run to completion would be cooperative, if you squint.

Rivian decimates staff to put a brake on spending

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: The end of electric vehicles

I've heard many people say they're "investing" in an ICE car. Then listing the tens of thousands they've spent on it...

It's not limited to EVs.

Lender threatens to sweep MariaDB accounts over private equity bid

Richard 12 Silver badge

I assume this is because of the public filing, instead of a private "hah, nope" response to the "offer".

The post below implies the offer is higher than current trading, which would make it serious though

Google co-founder Brin named a defendant in wrongful death complaint

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: going fishing for deep pockjets

He contracted the work. That usually makes him jointly liable for failure.

The other allegations are about a coverup, which is far more serious

U-Haul tells 67K customers that cyber-crooks drove away with their personal info

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Not really 'cyber-crooks'.

There's a lot you can do with a name and a driver's license.

Are you ready to back up your AI chatbot's promises? You'd better be

Richard 12 Silver badge

I believe it was the "90 days afterwards" part that the chatbot stated.

The human appears to have said "yes, a dead grandma qualifies", but not mentioned any other conditions.

Richard 12 Silver badge

They didn't pay damages

The court simply ruled that they had to honour the contract the chatbot created on their behalf.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: "In a few years, it will be a different story."

I don't think there's any evidence that a generative LLM can ever be relied upon, and plenty that it cannot because the fundamental concept is stochastic, with low resolution so the probability of unwanted results is always going to be pretty high.

It's going to need some other type of system.

Richard 12 Silver badge

Civil cases can set precedents, so maybe?

Please stop pouring the wrong radioactive water into the sea, Fukushima operator told

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: "could cause us to lose the trust"

You never, ever start that PR stunt unless you're confident and happy to follow through.

His choice to bring out the glass.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: It's friday - time for beer.

Most countries have companies that deliver beer and/or other enjoyable beverages.

My manager has sent me hot chocolate on occasion.

Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: Well we knew it would happen

[citation needed]

Richard 12 Silver badge
WTF?

How long is your commute, Mr Smith?

The school/nursery is a 10 minute round trip from my home office.

When I worked in an office, my commute was a 3 hour round trip.

In most jurisdictions (even in the US) the law requires that employees have occasional 20 minute breaks. (Details vary)

In which of the above situations is that legally-mandated break sufficient to collect children, and which is it only long enough for a coffee (or smoke)?

City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M

Richard 12 Silver badge

Re: What would it cost ...

All councils are legally required to do subsets of the exact same set of things.

Some of them don't do as many things and share responsibilities with another council, and some have chosen to do less of one thing and more of another, but the things are the same as they are defined in law!

Councillors are the ones who think they're somehow special and different to the next council over.

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

Richard 12 Silver badge
Flame

Re: What the hell?

I find your use of "typical" and "usually" disturbing.

How many boiler explosions have you witnessed?