Posts by Denarius

NASA Swift rescue mission spins into trouble during commissioning

reaction wheels again ?

given these are _old_ tech in space now why the immediate failures ?

NTP server that traveled back in time caused massive Aussie mobile outage

Re: GPS card that … “did not operate as expected”

CSIRO stopped allowing external network NTP access years ago due to network traffic costs. I still wonder why server was powered up off the network or on test network first if its Level 0 to confirm time is good.

Tech support chap told angry customer to think inside the box – and solved the problem

Re: "when many phones still had removable batteries"

likewise some "tradie" phones had replaceable batteries and lightweight water proofing. eg ZTE 84? Fashion seems to have passed as external batteriy top ups are a thing

Re: Basement datacentre = perfect connection

sounds like a new datacenter I was installing Unix servers in. No coverage beyond reception by design. Whole site is mostly underground for security reasons. However, in server rack lines a couple of bars were available every 5 meters or so. Yes, the aircon ducts also guided 3G adequately for usable signals. BTW, the simpler low capacity cameras in dumb phones sometimes produced better video images of clouds forming during seabreeze front flights than current shiney shineys, complete with days of battery life.

I find I have to turn off everything to get a couple of days use now. What is puzzling is the amount of data "used" when I make no calls and only 3 SMS with data on. Leaving data off only kilobytes is used s expected.

User crippled a network while trying to learn Nmap

HPUX compiling

IMHO, HPUX9.x was "difficult" So many libraries missing. However, once the packags were installed worked ok mostly.. HPUX10.0/10 better. Didnt have problems on 10.20 but was using the full licensed compiler, not the OS only linker compiler. Linker/compiler would build gcc successfully.

Re: Destroying HDDs

in a previous life IT removed the disk platters, went outside with them and gas axed them. The surface alloy crystallises then soften. A few hammer hits and a course gravel is left. Still use the magnets to find dropped screws, nuts etc

It's an AI web, and we're just rats in the walls

regretably, a good summary

Missed the potential freedom from snooping slurping "apps" on idiot phones instead of using browser interfaces to bureaucratic institutions. Perhaps the Amish have a point. Choose and control technology, not get run flat by corporates and tech bros

Telstra outage: Failed emergency services calls, train chaos, payment systems down

rumour has it

Perhaps executives bonuses for cost cutting meant low pay leading to high staff turnover and lost corporate infrastructure knowledge. Not hard to setup robust NTP. Me suspects someone used vendor TZ which put secondary servers off correct TZ which then put clients off timekeeping. More than 20 minutes and ntp ignores servers in setups I have seen. Time to reread the manual

No doubt Board and CEO will get big bonuses for heroically fixing the problem.

Most big cops are process focussed. Makes it easier to avoid responsibility.

Police intercept tipsy teens after Waymo snitches for shooting Orbeez out of the car

Re: Untrained (Police) Eyes

I wonder if said miscreants now understand some behaviours are not a good idea?

Singaporean sovereign wealth fund Temasek thinks AI is going to pay off

pity

I thought Singapore government too smart to fall for techBro hubris.

Boffins bet on quantum computers, AI supers to solve fusion fuel dilemma

phamtom solutions for a zombie problem

stuff that doesn't really exist for a problem always 20 years away from working. Sounds like GhostBusters chase minMin Lights

Somebody told DeepSeek to build in-browser ransomware and it gleefully complied

doing too much

maybe there is a role for simple browsers that _only_ read html, dont have scripting etc. Same with cars with analog controls for humans who can maintain situational awareness. Something easily repaired and not hostage to manufacturers after purchase. What was the joke about all software expanding until it can read email ? Software seems to have gone stupidly, trustingly far beyond the joke

Signal says UK plan to scan devices for nude images 'endangers us all'

Re: Zombie Starmer's Victorian internet: An Internet without Things.

LJ Peters had a term for this which annoyingly, escapes me. Something like Extended Confabualtion. The incompetent became an "expert" in some irrelevant activity to their real job which deflected attntion from their incompetence. His example was a headmaster who focused on organising child movement in corridors while competent deputy ran school

Grep this: Microsoft grafts (most) Linux commands onto Windows

scanning logs

grep has its uses but I prefered sed. Awk if log has structure which rarely happens. Used the AT&T UWIN commands for years which had Win32 native commands and a POSIX environment as much as practical. Pity thats all gone. Nice to see M$ catching up after a mere 26 years. They might even write a light, fast reliable OS eventually after borging QNX or equivalent. Yes, Satan wears thick coats, why do you ask ?

Satellite phone dreams orbit reality as direct-to-cell usage set to underwhelm

Oz may be better market

Given how mobile coverage drops off outside out densely packed cities, rural Oz would love this.

In NSW, even 100km north of Oz crapital coverage is nil for large areas. Ironically, containing a town with a Starlink downlink into national fiber. Even the government private radio network has no coverage. Same in western NSW.

Oddly, western Queensland is not so bad. Will try NT and NW WA later this year but expecting nothing outside a few towns. At least with 3G external attenae helped but thats gone now.

Pope Leo warns AI boom can give Big Tech and the people who run it too much power

Re: The emergence of AI seems very similar to the emergence of chattel slavery.

nope. Europeans tapped into existing slaving done by africans and arabs which had been going on since Roman times, if not before. As for chattel slavery, have you worked for any of the mostly yank outsourcerers ? They had dehumanisation down pat before AI boom and bust took off. I was amazed how the internal babble from manglement sounded like Soviet production dogmas with 5 year plans, production goals etc. Conclusion: All unchecked power is potentially evil and becomes so. I cant think of a counter example.

Brit mathematician lets AI agent loose with credit card – cue password leaks, CAPTCHA chaos and more

regretably, no. The gullible, especially the self annointed "clever or wise" do not learn from mistakes. See above about infinite stupidity

Microsoft tackles quality control issues. Just kidding, it's encouraging experienced workers to leave

Re: Raising the bar

Saw same in 1990s and early 2000s. Once manglement saw who was volunteering to leave they had to pay retention bonuses to keep critical skilled staff. Morons the lot of them. Question: Who the heck trained modern manglement to be so incompetent ? Mere stupidity just isnt sufficient IMHO.

You can now run WSL on Windows 95, in case you're crazy, too

Re: At a loss

cheap reliable insecure small file server in M$ only totally isolated network. To be used by those unable to setup Wine without a whine. My coats the one with the Win95 reference in left pocket

nice hack but been done before

David Korn when at AT&T put out a unix subsystem for WinXP that also ran a bit diminished on Win98. Ran OK on Win7. Not tried it on Win10 but will look for the last release install package in my archives when trenching, fencing, sheep marking and sale done. Have a look on last year of ksh93 in USENET if Google kept mailing list. Server shut down years ago but code might still be archived somewhere.

Linux 7.1 will have an optional new NTFS driver

Re: Solving a problem that doesn't exist

Better yet, xfs

Re: Ownership nonsense

Odd, Been reading NTFS and writing disks from Linux for decades and not had a problem. Perhaps you missed the mapping of NTFS to unix like systems is not 1-2-1 the ownership and group is faked to the mounting user. So you see the ownership as you, but this is a mapping fudge. Way back in last millennium a BSD recovery disk did ignore all permissions to allow password recovery. Long since replaced by real read/write updating from recovery media.

Security contractor blew the whistle on support crew's viral indifference

Re: Lazy by design.

that sounds like a predecessor to DXC tried in Oz. Cut productivity so manglement insisted it was a success.

DXC staff to strike in Australia after some go without pay rise for five years

I bet

DXCs manglement class have had payrises and bonuses.

Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right

Re: I have a solution.

This is ElReg. Get the BOFH to apply a LART more often. As for AI making humans worse , hasn't what passes for progressive culture done similar with every ones fine, so long as they dont disagree with current world views/platitudes ?

Turns out your coffee addiction may be doing your brain a favor

Re: A question

a colleague posted to SE Asia tells me Luwak coffee is not worth it. Question: Who thought of getting beans out of civet droppings ?

Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting

you forgot the bureaucrats. Every bureaucracy expands, demanding more scope as it does so. See Parkinson Law and Peter principle

Execs love AI, just not enough to pay for user training

Continuing the contempt

All manglements seem to despise the coal face staff. Might be getting worse as narcissists training to be psychopaths has become mandatory qualifications for old business CEOs and boards IMHO. Elsewhere in ruins of western culture, the love of lies also seems to have become normal. As for disconnect between middle management and the upper echelons of bastardry, whats new ? Everything is easy for those who don't have to do it.

Pop music fans literally dying to stream hot new albums – in car crashes, that is

Re: US Centric...

In Oz hard to tell in ACT due to local incompetence. In Auckland, NZ impossible to get worse. Best clue in Oz is to identify vehicle type. If 4WD, danger, Will Robinson. If Ford Ranger, run behind most massive barrier nearby. Did report check against vehicle category?

IBM stock dives after Anthropic points out AI can rewrite COBOL fast

Well analysed. Migration off a mainframe is an ecological move. Difficult to get tropical fish to thrive in arctic lakes

Every day in every way, passwords are getting worse and worse

Re: Passkeys? Yeah, sure....

and for some of us who do manual tasks like forestry, digging, thus having much skin abrasion, fingerprint devices dont work reliably. As most of us use multiple devices, easy _local_ transfer of data would be a godsend. Needless to say, its available in the "Cloud" which makes any thoughts of security futile

Microsoft boffins cook up archival storage using Pyrex glass they say can last over 10,000 years

Re: Eh, it's Microslop

OK, maybe technology will just be halfbaked, like most of modern M$ technology.

DOGE bites taxman

did they say sacking 8000 execs ?

if so, good start. As for technical staff, beancounters usually start there. After all , how hard can it be ? /S

Palantir spent $25M on CEO flights so Alex Karp could do all the talking

more bad memories

Shades of EDS. Dick Browns email missives from the company jet. Nothing new here, move along

OpenClaw is the most fun I've had with a computer in 50 years

memories

this article makes me think of the goals of the Japanese 5th gen computing. Self managing, configuring etc. However I still think general AI is a Tulip mania type phenomenon. Highly specific AI trained on curated data sets are useful. Thats not discussed here.

6,000 execs struggle to find the AI productivity boom

Re: remember six sigma ?

reasoning fault in article. When have senior manglement been right on anything IT tin the last 5 decades ? Fads, foolishness and hubris fed by bloated bonuses

Linus Torvalds and friends tell The Reg how Linux solo act became a global jam session

Linus in ACT

I remember the crowded discussion Linus had with Unix Group members at ANU in Canberra. That trip is when Tridge took Linux to the local Zoo where he met a penguin. Never thought the unices I worked on would be extinct or close to it from the OS Linus was talking about. I know AIX support is just moved to India, but IBMs newer Power chips dont support it, only DeadRat

Gemini lies to user about health info, says it wanted to make him feel better

shades of Isaac Asimovs robots

ITIRC in the Rest of the Robots short stories of Susan Calvin being misled about amorous intentions of a new man in work place because robot lied to obey Third Law, causing complete bitterness in Susan. Maybe "Liar" is title ?. As for AI, another rerun of Tulip mania IMNSHO.

Linus Torvalds keeps his ‘fingers and toes’ rule by decreeing next Linux will be version 7.0

Re: Frostbite ?

Hand feed a penguin again FTFY

Estonia hedges its bets on US tech while going all-in on Microsoft

manglement strikes again

A few golf days, couple of expensive lunches and suddenly propriety software is so good. Just dont ask your IT staff for opinions. As for Trump, TDS. Yanks have snooped since 1950s. Given recent patch issues, a dominant vendor could not be considered "reliable" IMHO. What puzzles me is the fixed belief that communications are unbreakable and always available. Having once had to get a small office up when telcos, power grid, government radio networks were down for nearly 24 hours after a severe storm. The office PCs were unusable as after boot, no authentication worked, let alone applications as everything was on remote servers. Now those servers are "cloud" situation is even worse. I suspect the Russians will be appreciative if they choose to cross border in drive to recreate the Soviet Empire

Bots are taking over the internet and AI users are to blame

maybe not

AI slop is making books appealing again. As videos, a few contributors remain almost trusted sources of information. None of them are old media. Sabine and Anton at top, but impersonation will happen soon enough if current enshiitification of communications continues. Heck, I might even restart buying saner magazines again

In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened

Re: Normal behaviour

what you mean us, white man ?

You mean manglement ask techies about support ? hahah ROFLMAO etc New here, I suppose?

Normal behaviour

In-house usually know about issues and often have fixes close to hand. Its the Outsaucery that has its own "process" that buggers things up

IBM says AI is insane in the mainframe as z17 sales surge

Re: AI refactor COBOL into Java !!

Doing to me ? What it did to hundreds of businesses. Slow, unreliable due to IBMs version leaking like a torpedoes Titanic. However it did make a good living for me finding and writing monitoring code that eventually worked around issues, usually with controlled restarts. No idea if Suns version was as bad as never used it. However it is the idea of AI rewriting various versions of ancient, merely old and current versions of COBOL into _any_ language that I mostly fear for the few coders left outside India still on the job

Tesla revenue falls for first time as Musk bets big on robots and autonomy

Re: Needs money

Historically the first firm into a new field is usually not the long term success. eg, Wright Brothers, Cray. I think even Starlink will fail if one of the other SkyNets succeeds. (which is a dubious assumption at present).. If Project Kuiper succeeds, satellite direct to phone without the extra modem Starlink needs will be a big incentive. In short, Tesla may be suffering the First in Field effect as cheaper Chinese vehicles undercut them unless Tesla get 1000 km range and 15 minute charge with better batteries. maybe Sodium ? Thats assuming a working national electricity grid.

Banker claims Oracle may slash up to 30,000 jobs, sell health unit to pay for AI build-out

is this victory for Postgres and MySQL ?

One can hope

No one talking about a datacenter could be a sign one is coming

fix process

How about national ban on _any_ concessions to _any_company wanting to build a project, especially tax and rates. Tax payers should not be competing to be ripped off by wealthy companies. Allowing that sounds like socialism, the destroyer of worlds

Future of UK's multibillion Ajax armored vehicle program looks shaky

Re: The end is near for the AJAX armoured vehicle

amazing the Oz Defence circus hasn't ordered dozens of them then. Love failures "Not Made Here" mindset

Lawmakers urge FTC to probe Trump Mobile over 'deceptive' marketing

usual pattern of decline

Big powers seem to die in same way over millennia. Growth, brief stability, arrogance breeding incompetence, decline, a brief recovery leading to political/military implosion. Something breaks their internal systems, long droughts, extended cold weather leading to famine and plagues,invasions. A few cases even economic collapse due to currency devaluing. One reason Dutch East India Company lasted so long was the backing bank maintained its currency value for a century. A century ago a pommie pound was good anywhere. Even cheques (Aus spelling) were regarded as solid.

As for wannabe subsequent powers, attempting to restore the "Gories of the Past" (sic) usually means a century or 3 of disaster.

Re: Anyone with even half a brain

reminds me of Roman slogan. "Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad"