Posts by Sorry that handle is already taken.

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

This isn't stupidity, it's ignorance

Azure CTO pastes Doom into Paint one frame at a time

Re: "earned the right to do some frivolous coding"

I'd rather he spent his time...

Do you pay his salary?

Windows 10 LTSC 2021 has five months before security updates cost extra

We will actually be debating if we shall go from 10 to 12 or from 10 to 11, depending on hardware and such

Having dipped my toe in the penguin's pond and found it inviting, before opting to stick with Windows 10 for now (via IoT Enterprise LTSC), I think I've already made the decision on where to go once support runs out in 2032. I just can't see Microsoft backpedalling so hard and far that Windows 11 or its successor, whatever that might be, will ever be an option for anyone even slightly concerned about privacy and control over their own systems.

(Look at me, evangelising Linux without even using it...)

A deep dive into Nvidia's Vera CPU and the Olympus cores that power it

Re: Microsoft and Chip Design

Even though multi-threading is now universal on modern x86 CPUs, single threaded performance is still about 5-6× that of the best Netburst could offer, even at the same clockspeed.

Windows 10 refuses to die, and the security bill is coming due

Ubuntu LTS is feature frozen, that's why it can be supported long-term. Every edition of Windows 10 is also feature frozen at this point...

For Win10, Vanilla support ended oct 2025, ESU for consumers (first time it is offered to consumers) will end on oct 2027, ESU for bussiness will end on oct 2028, and IoT support will end on Jan 2032 (the OS launched in Jul 2015)

So, again, complain to the seller of the device for choosing the wrong version of Windows, not to Microsoft.

What's different in Windows 10 IoT (Enterprise... LTSC... 2021) that makes all other versions of Windows 10 impossible to also support until 2032?

Absolutely blame Microsoft.

Fortunately there are ways to in-place upgrade an existing Windows 10 install to IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021.

Microsoft is losing the battle to protect license lucre. It better get used to the feeling

Re: Office Alternatives

Even after converting the file to ODS it's still a disaster

It looks like LO Calc hates XLOOKUPs

Re: Office Alternatives

A spreadsheet that doesn't handle tables (and I'm not talking about a database table, just a two dimensional array of data) is a very strange concept indeed!

I dabbled with OnlyOffice briefly but bounced off it when I discovered that it's only designed to resemble MS Office. The functionality is noticeably different and a lot of things that you can customise or modify in MS Office are hardcoded in OO. It was frustrating to get used to both things that looked identical behaving differently and the loss of functionality.

Office Alternatives

As every Reg reader knows, there are fantastic FOSS answers for office productivity

I have a fairly rudimentary OOXML spreadsheet that brings LibreOffice Calc to its knees. It contains is a single relatively small table of data, a few basic calculations, a row filter and some conditional formatting. It's baffling.

Memory makers are slaves to the boom-bust rollercoaster, and the AI boom is the wildest ride of all

I think it hasn't recovered because by the time the crypto mining bubble was winding down, a spicy cough from Wuhan was spreading across the globe, and then by the time the effects of that were subsiding the GenAI bubble was in full swing...

"The RAMpocalypse may be the precursor to the AIpocalypse"

There have been AI winters before and there will be again.

Zig creator calls Bun’s Claude Rust rewrite ‘unreviewed slop’

Puns

So you could say Bun's Claude Rust rewrite is buns?

Lucky 13: SpaceX aims for July 16 Starship flight test

Short interest in SpaceX appears to be 17%. A lot of people betting that it's overvalued, but fewer than I'd expected to be honest.

For comparison, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft are all around 1%.

Even Gamestop, which once had a short interest greater than 100% (leading to a short squeeze, a pump & dump and endless hilarious financial conspiracy theories), is now "only" 14%.

KDE Plasma users face a dire omen of change: 6.6.6 arrives

Re: "Book of Revelations, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, page 115 says that the number is 616"

I'm not sure a single post on The Register is going to be the place anyone learns about emergency services phone numbers for the first time...

I experimented a bit with Linux recently and that was one of the things that frustrated me.

"WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS?!" So, Wayland, apparently. I liked almost everything else about KDE Plasma.

Micron locks in historically high memory prices for five years

It's probably about time for them to get caught colluding again, right?

Well...

...fuck.

The memory crisis is getting so bad that even retro RAM prices are going to the Moon

Re: Pop little bubble, pop!

Well, I suppose that e-waste does have a scrap value, just like those abandoned and useless railways!

Re: Pop little bubble, pop!

I'm not sold on the railroad analogy. If (or when) an LLM company goes bust the only infrastructure it leaves behind will be e-waste in a few years at the most.

Re: Pop little bubble, pop!

Is that the popular opinion?

The bubble is the fact that several hundred billion dollars has so far been poured into it based mostly on hype, promises and desperation. The technology can't do most of what its salespeople and boosters would have you believe it can do, the companies doing the "AI" still haven't figured out how to make it profitable, most of that money simply gets turned into entropy and depreciation (as opposed to useful infrastructure) and those investors will want a return someday. The bubble bursts when the money hose is turned off and everyone's left standing around counting their losses. It isn't a commentary on the technology itself, merely the wild disconnect between the hopes and dreams people are attaching to it and reality.

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

Re: Shame

Haven't played Destiny 2 in years for example but that appears to be staying online for the forseeable. I guess we'll see how long that actually remains up.

This was always the question but I think it became a more interesting one when they had to dramatically increase server capacity the day it transitioned into maintenance mode, if Steamcharts is to be believed.

The content is still being sold on all platforms, although given recent live service debacles that's no guarantee it remains up, either. I think it all hinges on whether Bungie survives Marathon...

Windows devs rerolled old code to save precious bytes

Re: emulator for an unnamed processor… identify potential candidates

Itanium is my guess

Arch Linux locks down AUR signups amid wave of malicious commits

That's especially true as a lot of Windows refugees are being pointed to CachyOS as a high performance option for gaming, so a lot of inexperienced users are switching to it without understanding the intricacies of package management, and the potential dangers.

As one of those refugees I experimented with Cachy quite a bit recently and liked it a lot because it didn't prevent me from doing much and I could use the latest versions of everything, but I found the AUR confusing in a way. I needed to use it for a few things (e.g. Google Earth), but it comes with fairly hefty warnings that essentially contradict this necessity and it seems ripe for exploitation.

Chinese e-tailer claimed 14-inch box stretched the size of a 9-inch tablet

Re: Beancounters...

Beancounters are shockingly bad at risk.

If they were good at risk they'd be an actuary rather than an accountant...

Trump phone has HTC guts. Tremendous guts. The best guts

Re: Surprised

And for some reason a number for one "Jeffrey E" is saved on it so best to delete that too.

AI heavyweights warn their tech could help terrorists develop bioweapons

Re: AI

No but it will totally tell its creators how not to go bankrupt and then how to cure cancer Real Soon Now™

About that...

Intel bit off more than it could chew with 18A process node

A one-off?

If you ignore the dramas they had with 14 nm, 10 nm and "Intel 7" (i.e. Raptor Lake), I suppose.

Bezos rocket fell short after cryogenic leak cut engine thrust

Re: Too many failures

What did you know that we didn't?!

Starship and Super Heavy have certainly been pushing the envelope from day one, and (I assume) a lot of the testing has been for things that are difficult to simulate. I wonder if the company has developed the attitude that there's no problem it can't solve. It would make sense, with a tech bro at the helm.

And for what? So far the only viable application suggested has been the delivery of larger Starlink satellites to orbit and some "if you build it, they will come" style statements about lifting the size limitations current launch systems place on satellites.

SpaceX currently operates one of the most reliable orbital class rockets in history.

In contrast to SpaceX, Blue Origin seems to have more of an "old space" corporate culture. It took billions of dollars and more than ten years of development before New Glenn made its first flight. Lack of caution or "rationality" aren't things the company can be accused of.

Re: Too many failures

continuing failures

???

This was only the third launch of New Glenn, and the first failure to deliver the payload to its target orbit.

Company CEO flooded file share with smut, called for help after he deleted it

Whoops

I was recently searching through some archived project directories on my employer's project server for traces of work I couldn't remember doing and found a directory that was about 50 GB larger than it should have been. One of the people working on the project was using a subdirectory within their area of responsibility as personal file storage. It looked like their entire life was in there. Then the project got moved from the active server to the archive server, so all of those personal files are now preserved forever and accessible by anyone with access to that drive, which is essentially everyone in the company.

Swift thinking buys NASA observatory a little more time before re-entry

The end of summer

So... they have about nine months?

AIs don't like religion – particularly Jehovah's Witnesses, study claims

Re: Full disclosure, I am an atheist, but ...

Atheism, like theism, is not a philosophical position. It's a matter of faith, i.e., a deeply held personal conviction or belief.

Believing in something you cannot prove the existence of is faith. So far so good. I hope you can see where I'm going with this.

Linus Torvalds to ‘start being more hardnosed’ about ‘pointless pull requests’ – some of which come from AIs

Re: Won't last forever ? :-/

Is that even remotely realistic?

Even if they (for some reason) enact a permanent feature freeze and then (somehow) eliminate every last bug, there will always be new hardware to support, at a bare minimum.

A Russian speaker and jailbroken Gemini went on a hacking spree and emptied at least one MAGA victim's crypto wallets

I think Nelson Muntz said it best

Ha Ha!

Google explains how it will infuse ads into AI answers

Re: DDG

I have DDG as my main search on every device at this point but it's just bing with a coat of paint, so I find myself back on google anyway far too often

Re: "Google assured us that people actually do want this"

Per google:

Just one year after its debut, AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch.

Of course this is all bullshit. It's visible to everyone who uses the search page so of course everyone who selects the first "result" (whether they realise it's confabulated spam or not) is counted as a "user". Or possibly even everyone who loads a results page.

(icon for google)

Re: Yuck

I'll continue being very happy to pay for Kagi instead.

Something about having to pay for google output just without the slop makes me sick.

And with or without the slop, google results are noticeably worse than they used to be.

The big AI companies are going to see their margins disappear

This is because once AI reaches super intelligence...

Hahaha good one!

What margins?

The generative AI industry's margins are currently universally negative, except for when they're not doing their accounting properly. They're propped up by external funding.

"But Alphabet, Microsoft etc. are profitable!"

Of course they are but wouldn't you think that if their generative AI divisions were also profitable, they'd be shouting it from the rooftops rather than hiding it?

Microsoft remembers that taskbars used to move

Okay great

How about bringing back multiple rows? Collapsing buttons unnecessarily adds friction.

Classic 7 is Windows 10 LTSC cosplaying as Windows 7

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

Another option I discovered while perusing Massgrave is to perform an in-place upgrade from your existing Windows 10 Pro to Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC, which has support out to 2032.

Re: lol

So why don't you install it in a VM and check it yourself?

The answer is that "Windows Classic" appears in the themes list but doesn't work, instead it applies a dark version of the Windows 7 Aero theme when selected. Likewise for the high contrast themes. Maybe they're on the to do list but this is an interesting project regardless.

lol

I do like the URL.

I think I know the answer already but does it support Windows 7's classic UI mode? It isn't clear from the project website.