Posts by deadlockvictim

Faith in the internet is fading among young Brits

Article Photo

My compliments to the sub-ed who picked out the photo for this article.

It is excellent.

Microsoft appears to move on from its most loyal ‘customers’ – Contoso and Fabrikam

When even your imaginary friends don't want to be your friend anymore...

Norway's most powerful supercomputer will use waste heat to raise salmon

Re: Artificially intelligent salmon?

My first thought was jumping straight for the pun too.

On a more serious note, hopefully the artificially raised water temperature won't have a deleterious effect on the biome being heated.

Airbus: We were hours from pausing production in Spain

Is Spain collapsing?

I get the impression that Spain is collapsing, slowly albeit, but collapsing nonethless.

Here in Switzerland the number of Spanish-speaking people in the twenties are risen markedly in the last decade.

I hear Spanish spoken as a matter of course on the train here. Is there a flight of educated young people from Spain? A brain-drain, so to speak?

Whenever I go to Spain (roughly every 2 years), the ground seems as dry as ever.

News of drought makes the headlines every year or so, often in Catalonia.

And Catalonia: the ticking time-bomb.

Reports of the Spanish health system indicate that it is over-extended but no politician dare fix it.

Madrid, Barcelona & Valencia, in common with many European cites (hello Dublin!) have priced all but their wealthiest citizens out them.

As an example from February 2022, a cup of coffee in the centre of Valencia costs €4.50 (the same as in Zürich) while 3 stops out on the train, the same cup of coffee costs €1.80.

Climate change threatens to wreak havoc on the important food producing areas in Andalucia.

And now this.

Am I over-egging the pudding?

I suppose that one could over-dramatise the situation in any country with a few select examples.

Microsoft is building datacenter superclusters that span continents

Re: a big FU to the GDPR, right?

They don't.

They lie.

And once it's done, it's done.

OWASP Top 10: Broken access control still tops app security list

Poor code quality

The problem with poor code quality is partly caused by modern project management.

Devs are rewarded for getting code written within a sprint that works, not necessarily that works well. And so, completion speed is rewarded and quality isn't.

In my experience, I have seen that those who write the user stories don't specify performance guidelines & criteria.

And we get mediocre slop as a result.

When I mention this to product owners, they tell me that that the devs tell them that what I want (namely better code quality) will take longer and therefore cost more.

In the end, this is a management issue, for POs are graded on what gets shipped and they don't care whether it works well.

The only real argument that I have is by telling the CFO that the mediocre code quality is costing the company more in monthly cloud costs, but then the onus is on me to prove it.

Foxconn hires humanoid robots to make servers at Nvidia's Texas factory

Re: the company will deploy the bots

Well, the AIs already behave as if they have Genuine People Personalities, namely Eddie, the ship's computer on the Heart of Gold.

Azure stumbles in Western Europe, Microsoft blames 'thermal event'

Dominoes

The apt metaphor here is that of dominoes.

One thing goes, which triggers a cascade, which ends up, at best, offering degraded performance (while charging non-degraded fees) and, at worst, leaves potentially vital services unavailable for days.

Imagine what will happen if the UK's NHS goes Azure (or AWS, for that matter).

Maybe, Microsoft, you shouldn't be following such a rent-seeking approach to data-centres and instead offering a good service, albeit with lower profit margins?

Azure's bad night fuels fresh calls for cloud diversification in Europe

Single Points of Failure

Matthew Hodgson» The trouble with big centralized systems," he said, "be it Microsoft Azure, AWS, Microsoft Teams, Signal, Slack or Zoom, is that they suffer global outages because they have single points of failure. True resilience comes from decentralization and self-hosting.

My worry is that data-centres will become targets in their own right, whether it be from locals whose area & quality of life has been destroyed by an insensitive & uncaring multinationals, from eco-terrorists looking for an apparently easy target, from people whose electricity bill is massively high (and I'm looking at the Irish here) or other diasaffected groups.

Now, if only Instagram, X or TikTok are taken down, few will suffer (and many young women will have their lives eased) but how many hospitals or other institutions necessary for our quality of life are dependent on data centres? We will learn the hard way once the data centres start shutting down more frequently.

AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay

Re: The American (CEO's) Dream

AC» The silver lining seems to be the wholesale slaughter in HR departments — a group that on the B-Ark would only be carried in stowage as live pet food.

Don't be so hard on the poor women working in HR (and, in my experience, they are almost always women). They are a tool that senior management uses to increase their bonuses. They are working within the framework set up for them and they little flexibility.

If anything, agentic AI replacing humans will make HR worse for employees in companies. AI is unburdened by empathy, the law, professional conduct and can scan through a lot more stuff that the poor women in HR. Someone quoted 1984 recently and this does seem appropriate.

We're all going to be paying AI's Godzilla-sized power bills

Re: Energy

Imagine what will happen when once we ask the AI to make us a nice cup of tea...

Amazon spills plan to nuke Washington...with X-Energy mini-reactors

I'm more afraid of what will happen when these become the targets of drone attacks.

Chinese gang used ArcGIS as a backdoor for a year – and no one noticed

Re: Misleading summary

That's not a surprise.

How many of us carry out checksums on all of the various objects on our servers to make sure that they are as they should be?

It seems as if this should become a standard security screening procedure and run often.

To be sure, the principal sin of the infected company was allowing anyone unauthorised to get a portal admin account.

If you let ne'er-do-wells in, it is not a surprise when you find the well-hidden hole that they make for themselves to let them back in.

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

You were never forced to listen to it. It is was downloaded onto your iDevice without your knowledge but it wasn't forced on you (distinction between passive and active).

No suds for you! Asahi brewery attack leaves Japanese drinkers dry

Asahi beer was already superdry to start off with.

Now it is only dry?

https://www.asahisuperdry.com/en-nz/our-beer/

OpenAI says models are programmed to make stuff up instead of admitting ignorance

Re: However

When a doctor sends you to a referral with a specialist, you have, 'I don't know'.

When you get a repeat appointment in a fortnight, you have, 'I don't know (yet).'

This is fair enough, doctors work on the principle of 'know something about everything and everything about something'.

If you happen into a field where they know they need to know more, it won't be admitted and you'll simply get a referral to someone who does or a request from the doctor to give her some time until she can read up on it.

Return on investment for Copilot? Microsoft has work to do

Re: Just add more calculators

How about a pop-up explaining to users that their usage is justification for CEOs to fire people and stop hiring young people.

If your 23-year-old child/nephew/niece/neighbour is having a hard time finding work, you might very well be a small part of the problem.

And then there is the environmental cost and that will also be their problem and not the CEOs.

Fire up the gas turbines, says US Interior Secretary: We gotta win the AI arms race

Re: Gazprom karaoke

«Solvable later» just means «It's not my problem. I have enough money for it never really to affect me».

Fiverr cuts 30% of staff in pivot to being 'an AI-first company'

El Reg» The founder sent out an email to staff in May saying that AI was coming for everyone's jobs.

That's not strictly speaking true.

The CEO's job is not under threat nor, I suspect, are those on the board.

It goes to show that the higher up the corporate ladder one goes, the more AI-proof one's job becomes.

Bring back your old Mac: 5 ways to refresh the OS on elderly Apples

I used the MacOS9Lives installer and the MTT version of that from the Macintosh

Garden on my Mac Mini G4.

It turned what was Apple's worst ever Mac into one of Apple's faster ever Mac OS 9 machines.

A sluggish 1.42GHz Mac OS X 10.4 Mac became a Swift 1420MHz G4.

I use mine primarily as a file server for my older Macintoshes. I can connect from all but the 512K to it be means of Ethernet although the System 6 machines are currectly read-only.

I can upload & download software to & from the Macintosh Garden, I can burn CDs & DVDs for my older Macs (although mostly I use the ISO-image) and I can also use the Mac Mini G4 as a games machine.

I opened mine up, increased the RAM to 1GB and stuck in an mSATA Card with an IDE adapter. Now it is quieter and faster.

The installers are not perfect and come with some caveats (caveant?):

• The sound is not adjustable. I get around that with a Bluetooth box connected to the sound jack. It works well for games like Diablo II, Deus Ex, Quake III and so on;

• The mouse sometimes freezes on startup and remains frozen in the upper lefthand corner;

• Because there are no drivers for them USB is v1.1 & there is no Bluetooth support;

• DVI can behave funny on it and I tend to stick to VGA. Max. screen size is 1920 x 1200 (or 1080, depending on your luck with DVI);

I'd like to give a shout out to 68kmla.org. It is also a great resource for old Macs and the members there have helped me a lot These last 15 years.

Microsoft open-sources the 6502 BASIC coded by Bill Gates himself

Does it come with Copilot?

White House nixes NASA unions amid budget uncertainty

Re: Fascism

Oh. Who do you think is America's founding father?

I was under the impression that there was more than one of them.

I'm fairly sure that America is female rather than neutral.

DHS says it needs $100M worth of counter-drone tech to protect America

L'etat, c'est moi

Of course, Trump & his administration have many enemies and there are many undesirables: Blue cities, people who could be more caucasian, people who could be a good deal richer, the EU, Japan, women probably not to mention people who loudly complain about the Trump administration.

If Trump has no problem sending in the army and what might as well be his presidential army (namely the National Guard) into LA & DC, why would his use of drones to such places and against such, em, enemies be any different?

Pot calls kettle black as China dubs US 'surveillance empire' over chip tracking

You and I are not so different.

The Spiderman quote is more appropriate.

The kettle isn't really calling the pot black because the Chinese government approves of state-sponsored surveillance.

The Chinese govt. is pointing out the hypocrisy of the position of the US government, who, in the past, called the Chinese government out for it.

Every question you ask, every comment you make, I'll be recording you

How to Use a Microwave Without Summoning Satan

Does this mean if I use a lower wattage, say, thawing some food, that I will only get a lesser demon?

Should UK.gov save money by looking for open source alternatives to Microsoft? You decide

20 year plan

I wonder whether it could be done over a 20 year lifespan.

0. Support teams, dedicated teams of programmers to start on software hurdles, dedicated evangelist teams as well as dedicated teams to go around training sysadmins and other specialists will need to be set up. The government should set up private companies (held with a majority stake) to do this and pay these employees well. The lessons from Fuijtsu must be learnt.

1. Start with LibreOffice: move everyone who can be moved over to it. Those with complex Excel sheets & macros will take some time. Get the general public service familiar with LibreOffice. Teach it in schools if needs be. It should become the new standard.

2. Move on to Linux Mint (or distro of choice): move those who can be moved onto it to it. Some in the public service will still require access to windows machines, especially those who use software which has no Linux version.

3. The hard nuts will require time and the dedicated teams mentioned initially should start on them. Lots of custom software will have to be re-written. I have no idea how Adobe Creative Cloud can be used in Linux. But then, not everyone has to be moved. If 80% can be moved successfully across to FOSS systems over, say, 20 years, I would regard this as a win.

Trump promises he won't put his boot on Musk's neck

Re: "We're all businesspeople here"

Having seen Musk's management style at Twitter, I would say that Musk is good at founding businesses but awful at managing them, when he actually manages them that is.

That is, the businesses survive despite him managing them.

Biden broadband benchmarks are BS, says Trump FCC

The Free Market at work

This is the Market at work.

The companies in question maximised their profits and their senior executives were richly rewarded.

What is the problem here?

Isn't this capitalism working as advertised?

Or can it be that the Free Market is not the best way to roll out infrastructure?

Surprise, surprise: Chinese spies, IP stealers, other miscreants attacking Microsoft SharePoint servers

Internet connection by default

I'm beginning to think that connection to the Internet by default is a dangerous & foolhardy idea and that it should be quickly phased out.

Why is SharePoint connected to the Internet anyway? It is a domain server. Sever it from the outside world and only connect it when needs be. Download updates manually and run them.

We need to do the same with desktop software and go back to the paradigm of the 1990s, without the modems, horrendously slow speeds and high prices for everything.

Being online all of the time is becoming irresponsible. Go online when needs be and stay offline when you can.

Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

Or high enough. Our house was built in 1926 and the garage that came with it was grand for most cars up until SUVs.

Intel swings the axe again as it looks to lose 5,000 staff

Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN)

The beatings will continue until morale improves...

With a name like WARN, will anything good come from this?

Ominous music (say, Mars by Holst) sound play in the background when employees are fed into the WARN grinder.

German team warns ChatGPT is changing how you talk

Script or Osmosis

I wonder whether AI had been used to write the scripts for these podcasts/videos.

If so and the presenters were merely reading the scripts, then I'm neither surprised nor worried.

However, if the presenters have started using these words more often in their everyday speech, then it is worth noting.

Personally, I'm happy that words like 'delve' are getting more of an airing.

Former and current Microsofties react to the latest round of layoffs

Re: MS is the new IBM

Excel is Microsoft's killer app.

Just try to convince the finance types that they should migrate all of their spreadsheets to LibreOffice.

Or that they should learn another spreadsheet program, another scripting language and so on.

And what kind of person have a lot of clout within organisations? Those whose primary application is Excel.

We're number 1! Windows 11 finally overtakes Windows 10

architecting

Given how the Leftpondians are fond of architecting things, I wonder if they get people in to plumber their houses when pipes start leaking?

And when getting a house wired, is the house being electricianed?

What is with the War on Verbs in the US?

Why must everything be verbed?

p.s. Have ye noticed that cultural imperialism is rampant now across the UK? Look at the Netflix series 'Sex Education' from a couple of years ago. That was almost unwatchable for the cultural imperialism. It gave such a misleading impression of the UK. Thankfully Emma Mackey & Ncuti Gatwa made the first few seasons worth it.

Look at El Reg and her obligation that all articles be written with US English as standard.

I am a fan of Tim Harford's 'Cautionary Tales' [1] but he is obliged to write his podcasts with a US audience in mind and so, anything that might shake US listeners out of their comfort zone is removed.

[1] https://timharford.com/articles/cautionarytales/

Microsoft leaves Pakistan but promises customers won't notice the change

Re: Off the map

ZX8301» map of the India/Pakistani border that was unacceptable to both countries.....

To be fair, that is not hard.

To say that the India-Pakistan border is contested is to put it mildly.

The India-Pakistan border is a masterstroke of English diplomacy (well, from their perspective, naturally).

Have a listen to Sir Humphrey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swKsughT3vM

So you CAN turn an entire car into a video game controller

The other way around

I wonder how much work that would be the other way around, namely controlling the Renault Clio (Nicole? papa!) with a games controller & computer?

Brain activity much lower when using AI chatbots, MIT boffins find

Re: AI is Alien Intelligence then?

Which song?

Use it or lose it.

Eat or be eaten by AI, Amazon CEO warns staff

Creating the next Generation of MAGA

Is this how autocrats perpetuate their hold on power?

Make entire classes of people unemployed and wait for the poverty & resentment to kick in?

Florida man expands crypto empire with new wireless service and phone

TACO

I can just imagine how this phone works.

You pick the number you want to call and you are put through to a marketing call centre which will try to sell you stuff.

You hang up and call the original number again and you are put through to another call centre.

Finally, on the third try, the phone give sin and you are put through to the number that you want.

Elon Musk pukes over pork-filled budget bill with Tesla subsidies on the line

War over the Republican Party

Does Elon have the power to cripple Trump in the midterm elections?

If Elon were to exercise his threat on funding elections, this time against Trump-supporting incumbents, how many senatorial & House could he help flip, I wonder?

Would it be enough for the Democrats to retake Congress?

Not that they would anything with it, of course.

Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' would create a regulation-free AI hellscape, AGs warn

States' Rights

Can it be that the US needs a governing party that respects States' rights and frees the American people from the overbearing arm of the federal government?

That would be the Republicans, wouldn't it?

Trump signs TAKE IT DOWN law meant to stop revenge porn

Re: Critical speech

AC» But that is exactly what was described in Project 2025, the actual policy plan behind the current administration.

The actual policy plan behind the current administration is: pay homage to Trump.

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

Don't

If you use CS, then keep the CS6.

Leave your CS6 box as it is, although turn off all updates and take it off the Internet.

Just buy yourself a new laptop/desktop and stick Linux Mint on it.

GAO finds billions in possible government savings, all without Elon's help

Purpose of DoGE

El Reg» If that's the case, one might wonder why the heck do we need DOGE in the first place?

We, in this case, being the US populace, don't and didn't need DoGE and DoGE was not in any case for them.

DoGE was set up to make life easier for Elon's companies (all that annoying regulation & compliance gone or hobbled), to scare the civil service, to make the service that the federal government offers worse, to reduce the power of the federal government by reducing its income (Hello IRS!) and kill off one or two agencies that really annoyed Fox News (USAID, Dept. of Education and so on).

DoGE was never about government efficiency or saving money. DoGE was, for Elon & Trump, a massive success although he engendered such hatred with his methods & actions that he ended up shooting himself in the foot in a most spectacular way.

IRS hopes to replace fired enforcement workers with AI

Senior executives

Once AI starts replacing senior executives, then I'll accept that AI is more than a tool for senior management to cut the workforce.

Culture comes first in cybersecurity. That puts cybersecurity on the front line in the culture wars

Re: Define nation!

sedregl» Which nation am I from?

The use of the word 'nation' in this article was sloppy, What was meant was the word 'state'.

I agree with your answer: you are a citizen of the United Kingdom and you are southern English. The word 'nationality' complicates matters here.

To further your question, I do not know what a country is. I know what a state is. It is a legal entity recognised by sovereign states as being a sovereign state.

Defining a nation is anyway not precise. Nations are reasonably homogenous, the people within said areas speak the same language, the population is sufficiently large to support itself and the people within even (in theory) practice the same religion. Are the Swiss one nation or four?

Are nations today even genetic today or would it be better to divide them along culture lines?

Are the supporters in the US of the two main political parties members of different nations?

As an example, I would regard Scotland, Wales or Catalonia as being countries. But they are not states. Would Northern Ireland qualify as a country? Probably not.

What about the Northern England? Or the Greater London Area? Or the catholic states in Germany? Or Provence in France?

These could all support themselves quite comfortably.

And then the EU complicates matter further. Ireland is a state and a nation but is her statehood diluted by voluntary membership of the EU, not to mention the global economic trade system.

Meta blames Trump tariffs for ballooning AI infra bills

Palantiri

AC» Saurons infamous Palentir stones from "The Lord of the Rings".

Would you please read about them in 'Unfinished Tales'?

The Palantiri were not Sauron's although he did finally get his hands on one (the Ithil stone).

Getting old is great. I don't remember where I left my glasses but I can recall facts from Tolkien that I read 40 years ago...

Trump admin freaks out over mere suggestion Amazon was going to show tariff impact on prices

Re: Probes

Jellied Eel» ...Or glossing over the 1,500 or so political protestors the last administration locked up...

These wouldn't happened to be the brave patriots who turned up on January 6, 2021, had a nice walk around the Capitol and then went home having had a thoroughly satisfying day out, would they?

I did hear about these fine, white folk on NPR, oddly enough.

It seemed then that you couldn't even commit crimes without the authorities getting all uppity about it.

Thankfully that has all come to an end now.

DOGE may help Elon Musk's biz empire dodge $2.4B in liabilities – Senate probe

"No one individual, no matter how prominent or wealthy, is above the law,"

Donald Trump seems to contradict this statement.