* Posts by Rich 2

964 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009

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How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: Old school

Yes. Please elucidate yourself

Exchange Online blocked from sending email to AOL and Yahoo

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AOL

AOL??? That still exists???

Actually, Yahoo???….

No App Store needed: Apple caves, will allow sideloading in EU

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Title

“…Apple caves…”

Hardly caving in!! None of this nonsense is the least bit relevant as long as Apple is trying to charge protection money for not using their magic money tree (app store).

It is this aspect that the EU need to take Apple to the cleaners for

Trump 'tried to sell Truth Social to Musk' as SPAC deal stalled

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Sorry????

Even taking into account any raving insanity on the part of Musk (I don’t know the chap so can’t comment), WHY would he (or ANYONE) pay ANYTHING for some Trumped-up nonsense like Truth Social? What exactly would anyone be buying? Apart from ridicule

Linux 6.9 will be the first to top ten million Git objects

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Re: a billion?

I was introduced to “decimal comma” notation when i worked in Germany some years ago. Yea - I’d rather not.

Windows 10 failing to patch properly? You are most definitely not alone

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Lucky escape if you ask me

Error code 0x80070643 eh?

Blimey. Good job it wasn’t 0x80070644 - that’s a right one, that is

EU users can't update 3rd party iOS apps if abroad too long

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Re: Why does anyone buy Apple?

Because Google is an even more odious company. And between Apple and Google, when it comes to mobile phones, there’s not really much of a choice for most practical cases

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

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Re: re: it appears we have the less intelligent people

Children ,children!!!!

Just STOP - this isn't slashdot

Incoming wave of AI is making buying PCs riskier for businesses

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But it’s all bollox

“Buy vPro laptops this year and they will be AI PCs; buy vPro desktops and they won't”

In practical terms, apart from the obvious fact that one is a desktop and one a laptop, there is no difference! The “AI” hardware will be redundant anyway and if you have a machine cursed with such hype then the best course of action would be to find out how to switch it off to reduce power drain

Unfortunately, in the medium term at least, the “AI” elements will just be a tax on an artificially inflated new PC price tag

Palo Alto investor sues over 28% share tumble

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Deserves it

“facilitating greater platformization”

Anyone who invests anything based on a phrase like that deserves to lose money

Dell promises 'every PC is going to be an AI PC' whether you like it or not

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Re: A great reason to build your own

Unfortunately, build-your-own laptops are still non-existent as far as I know

I’m sure there are bits you can buy to achieve this but not anywhere near the scale and ease of a desktop. I’m happy to be corrected though

Rich 2 Silver badge

Well that’s a new line of fun

I’m sure there will be a good selection of fun and exciting projects spring up to do something useful with that lovely “AI” hardware that we’re all going to be paying a tax on very soon.

Of course, none of these projects will be “AI” - hopefully they will be much more useful than that

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

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Re: NV RAM never entirely went away & predates Optane

That made me smile. I had completely forgotten about bubble memory

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

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Re: Product replacement must be part of any product selection process

Where I work, we have recently moved over to using Bitbucket. I asked what the plan was if/when it all goes pear-shaped. One person on the Teams call laughed and said “well that will never happen”

Yea. Right

…and no - I’m still not at all confident that there is any real plan in place. But that’s not my problem :-)

Avast shells out $17M to shoo away claims it peddled people's personal data

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Avast has not, however, admitted guilt

Of course, nobody ever thinks twice about giving away $17M to settle something they absolutely no-way not-never ever did

So as well as being crooked, they are demonstrably bare-faced fibbers too

Ubuntu, Kubuntu, openSUSE to get better installation

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Re: Non-issue

I agree. It never occurred to me that anyone finds installation an issue. As for partitioning confusing people, don’t almost all Linuxes have a “use default” option which would suffice for the vast majority of people that would consider selecting it?

I have heard and read a lot of things over the years about why Linux is a problem to use (and I’m not saying any of them are right or wrong) but I thought installation was done and dusted

Meta says risk of account theft after phone number recycling isn't its problem to solve

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Surprised?

Why is anyone surprised by this? Why would anyone expect Faecesbook to suddenly decide to take responsibility for anything?

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

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Re: Why I write very simplistic software...

You get my vote. I’m being forced to use agile at work after having largely avoided it up to now.

Agile is the king’s new clothes. If it was civil engineering rather than software engineering, it would go something like;-

- let’s build a bridge!

- ok, here’s some rubble

- What? No - we don’t have enough points to develop any cement. Stick it together with glue

- it’s not quite bridge-shaped yet but let’s put it over this motorway. We’ll call it an “alpha” and see what feedback we get

- It fell down and crushed a load of cars, eh? Hey - that’s cool. It’s a learning process isn’t it?

- let’s replace some of the rubble with cheese. Why cheese? Because we can’t make any bricks in the time allowed by the sprint. We’ll revisit it in another sprint and throw away everything we’re doing now and replace it with something else. Maybe bricks. We don’t know yet

- oh and stick some flags on it!! Because that’s a quick win

- ok, try that - alpha 2

- ah. That killed how many? Well that’s ok because it’s not production quality yet

- let’s replace all those flags with different coloured ones

- etc etc etc

I have yet to be convinced that “agile” isn’t absolute and utter bollocks.

As for XP, and “paired programming”, which wanker came up with those ridiculous notions?

Rich 2 Silver badge

Insane bloat

Some of the software today is bloated beyond any comprehension. Two that spring to mind (and I’m really not wanting to focus on MS here - everyone is equally blameworthy) are Word and Excel. I don’t know the actual numbers now but their code bases are insanely huge. Why the hell you need hundreds of megabytes (or whatever it is) to do a bit of word processing is beyond me and is utterly bonkers. Compare this to Word (or word perfect, or ….) from years ago that would fit on one or two floppy disks. And for 99% off use-cases the functionally is basically the same (except the newer version is demonstrably much worse)

Rust can help make software secure – but it's no cure-all

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"Rust will stop you using data after it's been freed"

[see title]

There are a couple of aspects to this.

Firstly, who makes memory access errors like this in their code? I use C and C++ every day (mostly C, which seems to get slammed at every oportunity for being "unsafe" and the work of the devil) and I literally cannot remember the last time I created a memory access fault of the types Rust protects against. If you are writing these sorts of bugs then, quite frankly, you are either inexperienced (no fault of yours, but you need to get up to speed, and quickly) or you are incompetent (in which case you need to go back to school or find another line of work), or there is a serious failure in the program structure (likely, poor division of responsibility/ownership) in which case the program architect needs to go back to school.

It's similar to the argument about 'Garbage Collection' and the fact the C++ doesn't have this "feature". The thing is, GC **ONLY** cleans up dead memory. Nothing else. It doesn't clean up dead file handles, dead socket handles, dead driver handles, etc etc etc. In contrast, C++'s destructor model can handle ALL these things. Yes, C++ is horribly HORRIBLY complicated, but in this aspect, it got it right. GC works. But only for very limited cases.

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

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Re: Quality, schmality

That would seem to confirm what is being discussed - the "dirt cheap" ones will probably have 'old' technology chips in them

Rich 2 Silver badge

Stoprot

I don't know if it's of any use to anyone, but I wrote a program that generates Reed Solomon error correction data for any file, plus the means of using that data to recover a corrupted file.

I have used this for several years now and apply it to almost everything I back up to my NAS system

You can find it here - http://knockknock.org.uk/stoprot.tar.bz2

That's not the web you're browsing, Microsoft. That's our data

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Re: does this only occur within the same account?

I don't think I ever have any issues using Firefox. And I have all sorts of anti-crap plugins running

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Re: If

"The great thing about FOSS is that it is at least possible for independent operators to answer such questions"

The thing is, and this has been pointed out many times in the past, in theory FOSS code is there for anyone to scrutinise.

...but almost nobody bothers. Ever.

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

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FCC

I thought it stood for "Fucking Colossal Collider"

Europe forces Apple to give its citizens some choice over iOS browser engine, app store

Rich 2 Silver badge

Oh dear

The EU are really not going to like this.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVEbxpOE13s

Virgin Media comes top of the flops for customer complaints

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Not really surprising

In my experience, most broadband suppliers are absolutely brilliant

…. right up to the point where they are not and then they are universally shit. No exceptions

Apple's Vision Pro costs big bucks to buy and repair ... just don't mention the box design

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150 apps

“Apple has just 150 apps that were updated for the Vision Pro…”

I’m intrigued about what these apps are. I would think a thing like this headgear can only be of use on a handful of applications. Unless of the 150, 148 are PoV shoot-em-ups

Apple's on-device gen AI for the iPhone should surprise no-one. The way it does it might

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I used to use startpage but then it transpired they got sold or something and the new owners were definitely not too interested in your privacy

Try Googling for it. Oh the irony :-)

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

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Fibs

"Microsoft and other cloud vendors promised the cloud would help reduce IT costs, not just in terms of on-premises hardware and software, but also in terms of IT headcount. It now seems that the cloud is the cause of significant new costs."

If I remember correctly, this particular scenario is called "lying"

noun: the telling of lies, or false statements; untruthfulness

adjective: telling or containing lies; deliberately untruthful; deceitful; false

Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

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Oh for Altavista!!!!

We can only dream

What is particularly grating is that all these problems that people are mentioning never existed years so. Stuff USED to work on Google. It’s Google that’s broken Google. Not anything else

Rich 2 Silver badge

I don’t buy this

Well not all of it anyway.

When I tap a search term into Google and it returns complete crap, it’s usually got NOTHING to do with SEO or spam. Firstly, Google seems to completely ignore what I have actually type. If I type in “-amazon” (ie, I don’t want any results that include “Amazon”) then guess what results I get. That’s not SEO manipulation, that’s Google completely ignoring what In type. I searched the other day for some git man page or something - I can’t remember now - and the first result was “Buy git man page at wherever”. That’s not because of some spam, that’s because Google are generating some useless advertising with my term echoed back at me.

And I second a comment made above with bells on regarding Google just returning the same half dozen or so usual suspects. Why does EVERY search have to return results from Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, Every, Github, Quora, and Reddit? Are these the only web sites out there??

I’m sure SEO and spam are an issue but I’m more sure that most of the problem is that Google (and all the others) is just plain crap.

Big Cloud deploys thousands of GPUs for AI – yet most appear under-utilized

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From the top of the article…

“…to capitalize on the surge in demand for large language models.”

“…the evidence suggests the majority of these processors are being under-utilized”

Well there’s a contradiction!! Mmmmm…. maybe the “surge in demand” ….errrrr …. doesn’t exist?

Not even poor Notepad is safe from Microsoft's AI obsession

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Re: Microsoft?

“I still call them directories; they will never be folders”

Oh my. The “folders” thing really annoys me. They are directories. They have always been directories and they always will be directories

As for the “\” DIRECTORY separator, OMFG!! How many millions if days (years?) of work have been lost to dealing with this particular fiasco in pretty much any normal programming language?

I HATE Microshaft - everything they touch is a complete show of shite

New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: The real lesson...

I once wrote an entire flight simulator control in assembler.

And by “flight simulator”, I mean a real one - you sit (sat) in it, it had hydraulics, and (literally) cost millions

It didn’t feel the least bit masochistic - one of the very beast and fun jobs I’ve ever done

Oh and it worked perfectly. Never failed

Google to start third-party cookie cull for 30 million Chrome users

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Re: Armchair

Actually that raises an excellent point.

Does this plan constitute “computer misuse” in terms of that law? For example, what’s the difference between this and some virus that’s mining Bitcoin in the background? Neither is of any use whatsoever to the user

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Re: Only stupid people use google crome

I can only assume you’re being voted down by people that use chrome. It utterly baffles me when anyone uses the spyware (especially supposedly knowledgable people that read the Reg)

Rich 2 Silver badge

So….

Which bit of this grand plan addresses the “I don’t want anything to do with your ad network and I definitely don’t want your ads stored on my laptop and I don’t want to waste my processor cycles on serving me a load of crap I don’t want” issue?

As an aside, if a website brings in (say) some crap from googly analytics and THAT sets a cookie, is that considered a 3rd party cookie? Or (as the web page specifically linked to googlies) is it a 1st (2nd?) party cookie?

Windows 11 unable to escape the shadow of Windows 10

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MS, bloat and crap software

If an OS insists on needing the kind of highly specced machine that W11 does (assuming it’s not actually a supercomputer or something) then one has to ask why? An OS should use the minimum amount of resources it can to leave as much as possible for the applications to run. MS have turned this idea completely upside down. If the OS needs such a powerful machine to run then that’s an excellent advertisement for why you should avoid it at all costs.

MS has always written shite software and (with the possible exception of excel and word) Windows is the shining beacon of steaming this pile of ordure. It always has been and always will be

Bricking it: Do you actually own anything digital?

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Re: True

We have an Amazon telly thing - or more correctly, my wife does; I wouldn’t touch it with Zuk’s if it was up to me) - and it’s a source of constant annoyance for our kidlet that a cartoon he watched last week suddenly requires paying some random quantity of money for. Being asked to pay £15 for a 40 year old film is another fun thing they try.

Amazon is a complete rip off - we (again, my wife!) pays for the Prime thing so it’s taking the piss to have to pay twice).

I like Netflix (for now) - with that, you pay your money and that’s it; you’re not expected to pay twice. Same for Disney+ (though I think that particular subscription might be reviewed next time round - I think the prices have gone up quite a bit - need to check).

It’s no surprise that torrents are still alive and well with the kind of shit Amazon pull, and I’m amazed their shitty piss-taking doesn’t get more press.

FTC wants to crack down on Big Biz profiting from kids' data

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This is all very well

But why only kids? The whole collective sewer that is faecesbook, Amazon, Google, MS, Apple, etc etc shield be stopped from doing this stuff for everyone. Not just kids.

Microsoft prescribes command-line surgery for HP Smart app malady

Rich 2 Silver badge

Why???

“… it might still take a few hours before icons and metadata change”

Why? I mean, in a normal world, it would correct the problem and the fix would take effect immediately (or at least after a reboot - this IS Windows after all). If it takes “several hours” that sounds like the “fix” is negotiating with some remote (MS/HP) machine somewhere. Or some other unnecessary and undesirable nefarious activity

Asahi's Fedora remix dazzles and baffles on Apple Silicon

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Re: Why?

“ Because Apple make superb hardware, but terrible user interfaces...”

Errrr…. Compared to Gnome? And KDE?

Really??? I’m no fan of the Mac UI but….

Four in five Apache Struts 2 downloads are for versions featuring critical flaw

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So…..

Why didn’t they take the faulty versions of the code off the server so it couldn’t be downloaded?

Is it me????

Your landlord should offer on-prem cloud, suggests immersed datacenter upstart

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: Correct me if I'm wrong

Get with the plan!!

“Servers” are SO last decade. “Cloud” is where all the cool kids hang out. At least until someone comes up with another stupid name

Shame about those wildfires. We'll just let the fossil fuel giants off the hook, then?

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CONGRATULATIONS

A big congrats to el Reg for succeeding in attracting a more international audience (which was your stated goal when you decided to go all American on us)

Unfortunately the majority of the “international” people you have attracted are American. Which in itself would be ok but you failed to account for half of them being red neck idiots who have to share their one brain cell between themselves and Trump

Rich 2 Silver badge

Oh dear

“… wildfires happen when brush and undergrowth isn't cleared from the forest floor… bla bla bla…”

This is way out of order and I might get thrown off the Reg for it (which would be a shame after 30 years or so), but you are an utter moron.

(I could expand on this but I think you get the idea. Oh. Then again….)

Rich 2 Silver badge

We are doomed

There are two basic problems with people (that’s humans. Us)…

1/ money trumps every other concern

2/ when it comes to the crunch, nobody wants to actually take a hit on anything

Some simple examples - out PM’s official title is “First Lord of the Treasury”. He/she has other titles too but that’s the one that “matters”. Governments (not just ours) are primarily interested in money. This is borne out by the fact that any government tries to solve every problem with money, or (usually in the UK) the lack of it. Much more preferable to actually DOING something.

If there are two ways of fixing a problem - 1) throwing money at it or 2) actually doing something constructive, guess which one most governments around the world chose.

Another very apt example is the utterly obscene idea of “carbon trading” - a “solution” that is worthy of a Dr. Strangelove scene. This involves one (rich) country paying another (poor) country for permission to pollute the world with planet-destroying emissions. You really couldn’t make this stuff up.

The second problem (people as a species, not actually wanting to do anything that might disturb their daily lives) can be very clearly illustrated by the recent arguments about extending the London low emission zone scheme. Everyone would agree (obviously) that being able to breath air that doesn’t carry carcinogenic particles is “a good thing” …. right up until the point where you (and me and everyone else) are asked to take a hit by actually implementing a measure to address the problem. And THEN …hell no!!!

I would add to this that the London scheme (like the one in Bristol and Bath and other places) itself tries to solve the problem with money (see the first point). A REAL solution would be to ban polluting vehicles altogether. But no - we try to “solve” the problem with money; much better to charge people to pollute the city then actually stopping them altogether. Not that this lets the protestors to the scheme of the hook. It’s a crap scheme - yes. But it’s still better than nothing which is the alternative.

So yes. We are doomed. I fear very much for my 7 year old kidlet. I don’t want to think about the horrors we are leaving for his generation - it’s too scary.

Microsoft floats bringing a text editor back to the CLI

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Re: edlin+

“Failing that, MS could win a lot of accolades by partnering with VIM and helping it continue.”

Fuck NO!!! Keep MS well away from Vim. Just no. No no no no no

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