* Posts by Steve Davies 3

7136 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009

Elon Musk can't wriggle out of SEC Twitter fraud inquiry

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Big Brother

Delay, Delay and Deny

"I did nothing wrong"

All part of the standard playbook of 'The Orange Genius" and Musk's overlord, Donald J Trump.

Delaying a court case for years is his SOP. I find that strange because if he truly did nothing wrong, wouldn't it be in his best interests (especially $$$$ wise) to get the trial over with sooner rather than later?

No? I guess that he's just like almost every other politician... as soon as they open their mouth, they lie.

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Joke

Quick Elon

Run for Congress then you can ignore subpoena's at will. (See Gym Jordan et al)

ANZ Bank test drives GitHub Copilot – and finds AI does give a helping hand

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Bank finds AI useful

It just makes giving your poor customers the 'Computer Says NO' a lot easier.

250 million-plus reserved IPv4 addresses could be released – but the internet isn’t built to use them

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: Plusnet

Have no real excuse for not enabling IPv6. All their crappy routers will ignore it. Only those of us who have replaced their shit with our own routers will see it.

I've stuck with them because of two things.

1) I paid £5.00 for a fixed IP at least 10 years ago. The idiots who run the FTTP/FTTH network around here (TOOB) want £5.00 per month for the same thing. I'd really like to know their justification for that.

and

2) when I have had the odd problem I get to speak to a human who does not try to make out that it is my home network that is at fault (Hey Talk-Talk and Vermin... are you listening)

Come on PlusNet give us IPv6 it isn't that hard you know.

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: Well, given this is a UK website

Sorry folks, since it moved to a .com URL, it is a US site. The IP address is allocated to Cloudflare, a US company and I might be wrong the owners of the domain are now a US company.

US laws might apply to cases that go to court. It all depends on the wording of the contract in the section that covers dispute resolution. I once saw the T's&C's of one company in the US that demands that all disputes are dealt with at a court in a drive by city in TX that meets for TWO days a year. Legal Yes. Ethical? Hell no.

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: Currys

Have an upvote for wishing them to go bust. Cue looking for a bread maker just before Crimble. Website says that they have several different ones in stock at local store. Drive to local store. Zero in stock. Spotty faced assistant said 'we don't have any in stock and it has been like that for months.' All they had with a decent selection were Toasters and Air-fryers.

Sites like eSpares are also good places to go for things like cleaner bags, as is Ebay. No Baldy Bezos tax to pay there (until AMZN takes it over)

Ford pulls the plug on EV strategy as losses pile up

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: Second life batteries

40kWh of these (from a crashed Tesla Model S) run my home during the day. They get charged at night on cheap power.

What's heading for landfill? Not these.

The recent Fully Charged Show Podcast that features the head of Gridserve shows how they manage sites with limited Grid capacity using Battery storage.

This is in use today.

Alaska Airlines' door-dropping flight was missing bolts

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: Door opened for civil suits

NOTHING will happen this year. Remember that it is Election Year in the USA (every year is an election year somewhere in the USA). Those [cough][cough] good folks across the pond, will spend more than the entire GDP of some nations just to elect 'yes' men and woman into jobs that most of them are totally unqualified for. (Boebert and MTG are good examples of those)

Because it is election year, no critical decisions will be made for fear of being called out for 'Election Interference'. Those Corporate Donors don't want to get pissed off. If they are then their $$$$$$$$$ will be spent elsewhere.

Mind you our bunch of twats in Westminster are not much better. Even the opposition who once had morals and you knew where they stood, are spinless corporate shills these days.

SAP hits brakes on Tesla company car deal

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: Tulips, South Sea bubble

And Trump wanting the US Economy to crash before November so that he can become POTUS for life.

Yet, the dumbass folks in middle america still think his economic policies are better than Bidens. I wonder what they'll say if the market does crash and their retirement pot rapidly heads towards zero and their home gets Repo'd.

Oh silly me. They'll still vote for Trump even if he is not on the ballot and heading for Gitmo.

Michael Bentine was right. It is a 'Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad world'.

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: make leases expensive on these vehicles

When the MuskMobile 3 was released in the UK (2019) the lease costs were around £599/month. Yesterday, I saw a Black (costs extra for that paint) MuskMobile 3 advertising £399/month lease costs.

not that I'd be seen dead in a 3 or Y. I nearly bought a Model S in 2018 but the handling was so bad that I passed.

IPv4 address rentals to mint millions of dollars for AWS

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

IPv4 addresses should be free

OR

£5.00 per month according to FTTH operator TOOB.

Oracle database deal in Azure comes with a health warning from licensing experts

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Childcatcher

Don't Do It

Your company finances will regret it if you do go in with Oracle on Azure. With BOTH MS And Oracle in the mix... what can go wrong?

Don't answer that... Everything with a huge $$$ sign attached.

Microsoft Edge ignores user wishes, slurps tabs from Chrome without permission

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: do not wank this Edge crap running on my machine.

until MS [cough][cough] corrects that in the next set of patches.

They have a habit of fscking around with all sorts of stuff just to fsck those who don't want their level of 'do it my way or not at all"

It is a game of cat and mouse. What we need is a monster trap for MS that kills it off once and for all. The world would be a better place without their slurping (and take Google down at the same time)

Zen Internet warns customers of an impending IP address change

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: Anyone using the IP for a self-hosted mail server" should just stop

Care to explain why? Not all of us want to suffer email down times and all the other crap that you get from many major suppliers.

Not everyone is moving to the cloud.

Perhaps... you work for on of these hosting companies...

Microsoft's vision for the future of work is you trusting Redmond to get AI right

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
FAIL

"to get AI right"

ROFL.

Seriously folks, there is so much that MS could be spending their $$$$ on and they choose to follow the herd into the AI cesspit.

What have they ever 'got right'?

Cue sagebrush blowing in the wind.

MS & AI? Destined to flail miserably.

Amazon calls off $1.7 billion iRobot buy, blames regulators

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Amazon taking a leaf out of the Trump playbook

Where the 'bully' tries to play the victim (by blaming the regulators). Any legal dept worth being in a job should have thought about that possibility before launching the takeover.

There is no way a behemoth like Amazon can ever be the victim. They (along with the likes of MS and Apple) could buy almost every bit of the competition from their cash reserves.

Top Linux distros drop fresh beats

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: GNOME V 2

Everything after that went to the crapper. The latest thing is little more than Bovine Excrement that has been left to fester to 9 months.

Who the hell decided that we no longer needed THREE buttons on the Top right of the window frame, when TWO would be enough?

The people responsible for that need to be taken out and put in the stocks until they repent.

I could customise Gnome 2 easily. The devs have clearly forgotten KISS with V3.0 onwards.

I've lost all faith in them and these days, I use XFCE but there are still bits of Gnome needed for it to run well.

Then there is the repackaging that makes errors appear (for example, Failed to load module “pk-gtk-module") which no one can explain why...

When on older versions of the OS it didn't appear.

That sort of thing could drive newbies mad. Many of us old hands (I go back to Ultrix when it comes to unix like OS's) simply shrug our shoulders and move on.

Linux is used by many of us commentards but it is still very rough around the edges.

Missed expectations, zero guidance: Tesla's 'great year' was anything but

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: It’s inconceivable to me

Don't you know that he's regarded as the new Messiah by the Tesla faithful. If he was eligible to be VP to Trump in November, then it would be a no brainer (which is what Trumps brain will be by then).

Luckily, he can't be VP or POTUS so the left ponders have been spared that particular disaster.

eBay tells 1,000 employees their days at company are numbered

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Pirate

Eh?

This?

El Reg has rarely encountered cost-cutting programs that improved anything but the bottom line for the short term.

got me shaking my head. Perhaps this might be closer to the truth

El Reg has rarely encountered cost-cutting programs that improved anything but the golden parachutes of the C-Level execs

who won't be around for when it all goes TITSUP and the stock price crashes.

US Supreme Court doesn't want to hear Apple, Epic's gripes about in-app purchases

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: SCOTUS - "we really can't be bothered with this shit!!"

especially when they have more important things to decide like Trump wanting total immunity for everything he didn't do. Strange that he wants that because he's always proclaiming that 'I did nothing wrong'.

Apple has botched 3D for decades. So good luck with the Vision Pro, Tim

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Childcatcher

Meanwhile...

The scalpers are out in force with ads for the Wonderful Device/POS (depending upon your viewpoint) on EBay trying to flog the as yet unreleased iThingy for $10,000 a pop.

Ain't capitalism just great.

Personally, I will pass on this just as I have passed on all the others. I'm sure that there are some who want this 'Not a Zuck device' thing. Good luck to them.

Now what happened to those Google Glasses with the spy cameras?

Microsoft hires energy mavericks in quest for nuclear-powered datacenters

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: They'll all be fed the same update together...

And have the update process hang (just like it does now) and then BSOD together. Boom!

US cities are going to struggle to green up their act by 2050

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: MW vs MWh

Yes, it was a typo.

It does not matter to those who seem to downvote almost everything that is said in opposition to the statement that we are green fascists.

Even posts that are 100% truthful get a fistful of downvotes.

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: Burying Turbine Blades

Is old news that gets regurgitated by the likes of Trump along with 'Windmills give you Cancer' and 'Windmills kill all the birds'.

For an alternative view...

https://orsted.com/en/insights/the-fact-file/can-wind-turbines-be-recycled

They say that 90%-95% of a turbine can be recycled today and are working on the remainder.

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: London is a similar latitude to Calgary

As someone who lives around 40 miles from London, England (to use the US way of describing the metropolis) and has 6x330w solar panels on the roof of my house, I know that it works.

Last calendar year, they generated 2.14MW of power.

To buy that leccy from the grid would have cost me well over £750.00. Looking back at the past history of PV generation, those solar panels have now paid for themselves (around last June). From now on, I'm in profit with them.

Solar does work. I just wish that I had more space on the roof for more panels.

University chops students' Microsoft 365 storage to 20GB

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: "over half of all data stored by organizations not serving a useful purpose"

Whilst that is probably true, the moment any of it gets purged is just one second AFTER a warrant is issued for said data. The person doing the deleting is now guilty of Obstruction Of Justice.

So all the old crud gets kept for ever... just in case.

Google is changing how search results appear for EU citizens

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Google had no presence

Yeah, and that large office complex next to St Pancras Station in London is nothing more than a mirage.

Unless, Google has sold it to a foreign government and the site is deemed to be part of the Embassy and thus a foreign country. Passports Please!

Microsoft 365's add-on avalanche is putting the squeeze on customers

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: ever more complicated to manage, licence and afford?”

It seems that MS has been reading the 'Oracle Book on how to screw customers with gobbledygook licensing deals'.

Very soon, those [cough][cough] optional things will be rolled into the base product. No more saying no to something that you don't use and never plan to use. Tough!

MS will start sending in their 'License Police' into customers very soon. They can't have the plebs screwing even $1.00 from the money that they OWE MS on a daily basis.

Just say NO to MS. Come on people, you can do it. You know it makes sense.

How 'sleeper agent' AI assistants can sabotage your code without you realizing

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

"It was all the AI's fault"

will soon become a common excuse.

As a developer, I want predictability in the code I write. Will any AI model give me the same results even 999,000 times out of 1,000,000? At the moment, I don't think so.

I'm sure that the bean counters will want to promote the use of AI in order to reduce development costs and times.

That may come back to bite them when they start to understand the time it takes to train even existing AI Models.

Beware using AI in safety critical system... There is a disaster waiting to happen... and it will.

Could immutability be a Leap too far for openSUSE users?

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Mushroom

re: A read-only root file system makes the OS much more resilient against disk corruption,

That is only half true

If a disk/ssd/nvme is going bad with a hardware fault, a read only FS will not protect you.

The R/O filesystem will only protect you from some threats. If the bad guys find the password or can crack it then read only won't stop the bad guys.

Many of us long time Linux users follow the KISS principle. All this containerization malarkey is a monster step too far. Sorry. The SUSE users I know love the old KISS approach. They will not like this move.

Why do Linux Distro management keep shooting themselves in the foot like this? We are just getting over the IBM/RedHat madness with CentOS and hiding sources then we have this...

I would like them to [see icon]

Musk claims that venting liquid oxygen caused Starship explosion

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: Hyperbole

The Hyperloop (Elons version) company was shutdown just before Christmas 2023

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67801235

Where did all the billions raised go?

IMHO, he is not much more than a modern day snake oil salesman (much like his idol, Trump). Promises the earth and delivers little and very late. Where's that Roadster 2 Elon?

Microsoft prices new Copilots for individuals and small biz vastly higher than M365 alone

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: an essential part of getting the most out of this Windows technology

Did you mean to include the word 'most'?

Without it, it makes a whole lot more sense to most of the commentards here.

Microsoft braces for automatic AI takeover with Copilot at Windows startup

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Linux

Oh... I'll bet the security bods will be onto this

and looking at what data is sends to god knows who without asking for permission.

Then they'll find buried deep in the the licence that you clicked through years ago, you gave MS permission to share anything it wants to with anyone it chooses.

Then we'll see businesses all over the world blocking every sire that MS sends to which MS will change on a daily basis.

And so the game of cut and mouse goes on.

Meanwhile the Linux and MacOS users sit back and laugh at the next big screwup that MS is inflicting on itself.

Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get faulty Windows 10 update installed

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Thumb Up

Have an upvote

for using 'Poopware' to describe their crap.

Going green Hertz: Rental giant axes third of EV fleet over lack of demand

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Holmes

One of the problems is that Hertz chose Tesla's

For many ICE drivers a Tesla is just far to different from what they were used to. PLUS... you would little or no help in working out what was what before you had to drive off the lot.

If the choice of EV included EV's that were less.... minimalistic and different from their daily driver then the uptake might have been more. As I have said for years, Tesla is not the only answer to anything.

Apple sets new 16,000-foot iPhone drop test after 737 fuselage fail

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Childcatcher

re: sootcases?

The mind boggles at the thought of people transporting 'soot' with them as they go on their two weeks in Benidorm (other crap resorts are available)

Send the kids up the chimney like they did in Victorian times to get the soot! [see icon] (only joking)

Need to plug in an EV? BT Group kicks off cabinet update pilot

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Thumb Down

Re: I see are at the start of roads on corners.

along with all the virtually mandatory 'Double Yellow Lines".

Nice idea BT but doomed to fail unless you can solve the cabling/parking and all the other legalities.

Road to Removal: A blueprint for yanking billions of tons of CO2 out of our atmosphere

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: start preparing ourselves for an inevitable further rise in sea level

Which in turn means:-

1) Vast areas of very productive farm land will disappear

2) At least 1 billion people will be forced to move... can we all come to your backyard always assuming that your home is above the expanded sea level...

3) The stopping of the Gulf Stream as a side effect of the reduction in arctic and antarctic sea ice which in turn leads to

4) Most of Northern Europe becomes uninhabitable due to the lack of the warming that results from the Gulf Stream.

etc

etc

etc

Thankfully, I'll be long dead by the time this becomes a reality.

Unless Kim Jong Un or some other despot starts a nuke tit for tat then none of us have a chance.

RIP: Software design pioneer and Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Pint

He will be missed

I first came upon Pascal when working for DEC. As I'd had some experience with CORAL-66 (An Algol type language), I was assigned to work on a project that used the VAX/ELN OS as a base.

Since then, and despite many years of having to work in C/C++, I preferred to work in Pascal. I jumped on board with Delphi for a while but the silly costs for the version that gave you access to Database components put me off it for life. Then along came Lazarus. At first, it was very flaky but has steadily improved.

I use an application written in Lazarus Pascal every day to analyze the logs on my Wordpress Server.

Thank you Mr Wirth for giving me access to a sane programming language for all these years.

I'll have [see icon] one of these tonight in your name.

Windows 11 unable to escape the shadow of Windows 10

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Since when has MS Support

been worth a bent penny?

Come on now, don't be shy... When exactly?

Their support unless you are a mega corp is worthless.

Much like their QA really.

Is it time for 6G already? Traffic analysis says yep

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Holmes

re: 5G runs the battery down faster

Add in all the AI needed for 6G and we'll be back to the mobile phone bricks of the early days. Welcome to 1G sized phones people.

Yes, I'm being sarcastic but you never know do you?

War of the workstations: How the lowest bidders shaped today's tech landscape

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: Seamless Clustering

Plus this made me cringe

Unfortunately, though, in the course of being shrunk down to single-user boxes, most of their ancestors' departmental-scale sophistication was thrown away. Rich file systems, with built-in version tracking, because hard disks cost as much as cars: gone. Clustering, enabling a handful of machines costing hundreds of thousands to work as a seamless whole?

My workstation for 3-4 years was a diskless microvax that was part of a VAX-Cluster. It was a great day when I managed to scrounge a small HDD to fit into it. While diskless worked... Coax Ethernet was slow by modern comparisons making the Microvax a full cluster member was a big step forward.

Naturally all Vax nodes had a version tracking filesystem as standard. That is something that we have lost. Why? Doh! MS rules ok.

Windows 12: Savior of PC makers, or just an apology for Windows 11?

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Alien

Re: AI ... that means Additional Income

That's what I thought when I had the misfortune (while I was at the Grandkids house) to see a TV AD yesterday for Currys/PC World (UK electronics and white goods retailer).

They were advertising a Samsing TV with an 'AI powered processor'.

Why the hell does a TV need anything related to AI?

Ok, I get it... AI is the hot buzzword this year but seriously, can someone explain why I need AI to watch TV? Is it for more of the Amazon, 'We think you might like this...' (and invariably shows something that you recently bought so no AI needed there)?

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Linux

The MS Model demands

that we are ALWAYS CONNECTED to the MS Mothership so that they can get all that lovely telemetry (or slurping of what we do)

You can see this with their push to make everyone use Office 365 in the cloud. No Internet means No Documents, No Presentations, No Spreadsheets, NO NOTHING.

Others will be following suit.

If you are a Windows user then you had better get on message PDQ.

Asahi's Fedora remix dazzles and baffles on Apple Silicon

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: Making Lookout the default mail client

Is Lookout an upgrade over the Apple client?

I use Thunderbird and have not suffered from the problems that you are describing. I have never used the Apple Email client in the almost 15 years of using OSX/MacOS as my personal device.

If I want to move to Linux or (shudder) Windows, then I can take my T'Bird data with me. That is a big plus in my eyes.

Musk floats idea of boat mod for Cybertruck

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Holmes

Re: Tesla Drivers Have the Highest Crash Rate of Any Brand

"accidents per driver per year" is what counts.

That and the cost and time to repair. As Tesla will not sell us (or anyone) parts then it takes ages to get your Muskmobile repaired because they are so busy. That all adds to the costs that the insurance company has to bear. If your Toyota gets pranged, you can go to almost any bodyshop and get it repaired. Saves time and lowers the costs to the car driver.

With the advent of these mega castings, more and more small crashes will result in a write off. Yes, they may save Tesla a few $$$ in production but the repairability sucks. Castings are almost impossible to repair unlike bits of sheet metal. They call that progress?

UK officials caught napping ahead of 2G and 3G doomsday

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Lychford Road

The original plan was to widen it westbound into two lanes. They cut down a load of mature yet sound trees and started work.

Then they realised that there was not enough room without taking at least 1.5m of the road away on the other side and shifting it all over. So they went back to replacing the main sewer that runs under the westbound carriageway and... 70 weeks later the road is still closed westbound (or was last weekend).

Another example of the lack of joined up thinking by Government, Local Government and companies. Just like the smartmeter fiasco.

All those lovely smartmeters that use 2G/3G are going to have to be replaced. Guess who is going to pay for it? Yep, we are.

Apple's easiest to replace battery is in... an iMac

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Going out of their way

to make it non-upgradable.

No change from the fist M1 Mac then? El Fruity didn't do anything different for the iMac. Their approach to packaging stuff that has to be as near to the CPU as possible is well known now. They engineer their stuff to get their performance up. The farther RAM it is away from the CPU the slower the transfer rate. Basic Physics come into play here. Intel and AMD are doing the same with their Chiplet based packaging.

As for taking up less space in Landfill... Anyone who puts a Laptop or iMac with a metal case into Landfill should be made to dig it up. There is a lot of stuff that must be recycled.

I recently took a 2010 27in iMac to the recycling centre or what was left of it. I sold the working screen to another user. The HDD and Ram were also used on another aged iMac so there was not much left.

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: Which Led Zep Album?

Easy...

Volume 4. Hydrogen is a sure 'fire' way for more people to take their own 'Stairway to Heaven'.

Hydrogen in any shape or form leaks. Because it is the smallest sized atom making perfect seals that work year in, year out is next to impossible.

You are gonna need a 'Whole Lotta Love" to make it viable. The slighest 'Communication Breakdown' can be catastrophic. Then the 'Levee will break' and there will be tears all around.

British railway system is getting another excuse for delays – solar storms

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Holmes

Re: Tosh!

Well said.

IMHO, the bits of the network that rely on Radio Transmission such as the RETB (Railway Electronic Token Block) as used on the lines to Phwelli and AFAIK, possibly some parts of the Far North of Scotland Line would be subject to interference from Solar Flares as would be the WiFi connections to the trains.

The safe passage of trains is more likely to suffer from wayward JCB drivers and Cable Thieves. Some stupid idiots dug up some cables near me only to find that they were all fibre optics. Yes, the shielding on the cable said that it was Fibre but they either could not read or decided that it was all fake news. All services were disrupted for three days.