Posts by nematoad

We've only gone and done it: Changed what you're used to

'Bye.

Autistic people often dislike change, it unsettles them.

I am autistic and coming the "New, improved" version of The Register was a nasty surprise.

Looking at what I would characterise as the Fisher-Price aesthetic was unpleasant, confusing and a real disappointment. As others here have mentioned the new layout is confusing, hard to scan and those bloody pictures get in the way and take up space. OK on my 27" monitor but, I suspect. hellish for anyone doing their browsing on a mobile 'phone.

For God's sake, we don't need pictures to tell a story! Some, or maybe all here, can read.

The icing on the cake for me was the comment "...we will accept your abuse in the name of lowering your blood pressure, but, honestly, it's quite unlikely to change anything." I found that patronising, smug and a display of "La, la, can't hear you."

Fine, it's your website and you can do as you wish with it, but don't expect everyone to stick around. I'm not.

Oh! What happened to our little badges?

So, goodbye and thanks for all the fish.

‘AI deflation’ comes to India’s tech services giants and puts downward pressure on revenue

What?

...autonomous quadruped-based inspection systems,

Sniffer dogs?

Ex-AWS legend explains what enterprises need to make AI actually work

Of course not.

The days when customers would accept poorly designed products are gone, Domo insists.

Obviously not a user of Windows, then.

Ain't lock-in great?

Ubuntu Resolute Raccoon spits out Xorg, but still lets you run X11 apps

Bah! Humbug.

...advanced things like screen capturing, screen sharing, and remote control, and so on, will need to find and adjust to new tools.

It looks like the replacement is not ready for the big league.

If the old system offers greater usability, why kill it off if it means inconvenience and disruption for certain classes of user?

Would it really hurt to leave the option open for those who wish to use it, or are we all being forced to use the new square wheels on our bike?

I am old and getting reactionary but I thought that one of the best things about Linux was that you always had a choice.

No longer it seems. All will march in lock step to systemd and their ilk.

UK tribunal sends £2B claim accusing Microsoft of overcharging for licensing to trial

Looking in the wrong direction.

...recent precedent from the Supreme Court on class action certifications.

From the wording of that statement the speaker is referring to the US Supreme Court as under English law there is no such thing as class action lawsuits.

They are either Group Litigation actions or Collective Proceedings Orders.

It seems as if the MS mouthpiece is taking orders from HQ in the US as they don't seem to realise that laws and procedures are different in other countries.

Blinkered, insular and US focussed, they don't seem to understand that there is more to the world that the USA.

Microsoft software resale appeal catches eye of £3.5B class action

No doesn't mean no.

There is a saying; "If the law is on your side, pound on the law. If the facts are on your side, pound on the facts. If neither is on your side, pound on the table."

It would seem as if MS, seeing the way the case was going, decided that if their licensing terms were illegal, why not try to claim copyright infringement?

When it comes to making billions off oppressive and abusive terms and conditions, no is never an answer.

ServiceNow allegedly says salesman 'overachieved' and is not entitled to comp

Time to move on?

'overachieved to a degree that was outside normal' in relation to his sales quota.

So what is the problem?

Do those dullards in higher management not realise that the more this salesman sells the more money Servicenow will ultimately make?

Surely the very act of closing such deals will be self-financing, if it is not why have incentives in the first place?

Of course it could be insecurity in the higher management or just plain jealousy.

Oh, why is the man still working for such a bunch of arseholes?

Open source isn't a tip jar – it's time to charge for access

Yes, but.

I agree wholeheartedly that the big users are leeching off of the efforts of those in the FOSS world.

I also agree that having a centralised funding agency would be of benefit to all concerned.

What worries me is that when this has been done in other spheres, such as music, we end up with the likes of the Performing Rights Society and their counterparts in other parts of the world. These organisations seem to be the equivalent of self-licking ice cream cones with no other purpose than their own survival.

If it is decided that a collection agency is to be set up, careful consideration must be given to ensuring that the terms and regulations under which it would operate are strictly spelled out, and provisions put in place to rein in any attempts to stray from the original purpose.

Windows boss promises to heal the operating system's self-inflicted wounds

Trapped.

...whether Windows users have the patience and faith to stick with the operating system

I would put it as whether Windows users are stuck with the operating system.

A lot of people cannot move from Windows;

a) Because that is what they have to use for work.

b) A lot of expensive equipment only works with a particular version of Windows.

c) Software needed for certain professions i.e. Photoshop are only available under Windows.

d) A lot of people don't know that there are alternatives to Windows.

MS has a stranglehold on a lot of the world's users so they have to take what MS is prepared to give them.

Microsoft points at Samsung after Galaxy app bug locks users out of C:\

The C:\ drive is usually assigned to the first bootable disk partition and is where system files and applications are typically located.

Now I haven't used Windows in years, so my knowledge may be out of date, but doesn't Windows spray files and data all over the C and other drives?

Having got used to the Unix way of partitioning it strikes me as a very inefficient way of chopping up your drives, but I suppose that legacy drag stops MS doing anything about it.

After years of being stood up, ARM64 Linux users finally get Chrome date

No thanks.

Launching Chrome for ARM64 Linux devices allows more users to enjoy the seamless integration of Google's most helpful services into their browser."

As well as all the snooping, privacy invasion and data vacuuming that goes along with anything coming out of Google.

Personally I would not touch Chrome or any of its derivatives with a ten foot pole but I suppose that Google is relying on those who either don't know or even care.

Musk's Grok sparks outrage after chatbot makes offensive jibes about football disasters

Re: without agency there is no offense

I don't know what effect ketamine has on a person's mental state but I do know what being autistic means, as I am autistic.

It does not mean that the person is incapable of knowing what is acceptable in society, it does not mean that they are unable to to accept facts and it certainly does not give them carte blanche to act as they see fit.

What being autistic does is give people a different focus, they are often extremely observant and can pick out anomalies and differences that people who are neurotypical may miss.

Musk may be autistic, I do not know, but I do know that he is an arrogant self-publicist and generally not a credit to the human race.

Lenovo shows off snap-together laptop with removable keyboard, screen, and ports

Old fashioned.

"2.45 to 2.66 pounds while being only 0.7 inches thick. "

"a few tenths of a pound heavier and about 0.1 inch thicker."

"3.62 pounds and it's almost an inch thick."

All very informative, I am sure, but what about those of us who have moved on from imperial weights and measures?

A quick conversion in kilos and centimetres would not have come amiss.

Anthropic launches new marketing blog, pretends it's being 'written' by 'retired' LLM

Employee, not software.

That means that Opus 3 might say things that Anthropic doesn't agree with, so it's making clear the bot isn't speaking on behalf of the company

I do hope that Anthropic are going to be paying their "AI" a salary. If you think that a piece of software has become sentient enough to start posting things that the creators do not agree with, then you should be treating said piece of software as an employee rather than a program that you have made.

Oh and a retirement plan for when the whole conceit comes crashing down.

What are these people on, for God's sake?

NASA points fingers at Boeing and chaotic culture for Starliner debacle

Re: Never Never

"...provider success over technical rigor"

If you make a cock-up and kill the crew of your spacecraft I would not call that a success for anyone, even if the spacecraft had been delivered on time.

Which in Boeing's case was not.

Just shoving things out of the door, finished or not, is not the sign of a well engineered, well managed and competent operation.

Will there be penalties, who knows? A little stroking of Trump's ego and and the exchange of a few brown envelopes seems to be all it takes to avoid any responsibility in the US at the moment.

Why does the Windows 11 taskbar hurt me like that?

"Locking the taskbar to the bottom feels like a step backward in user control."

Or the sort of thing that the Gnome devs would think was a good idea.

(Hint) It's not and generally gets people's backs up.

Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 spends $20K trying to write a C compiler

The polluter pays principal.

...programmers deploying software they've never personally verified

I know that it goes against all the EULAs that have been written in the last thirty odd years, but how about making developers and the companies they work for legally liable for the dross that they turn out. If someone knew that they might be financially on the hook for mistakes made by these so-called AI agents then perhaps they might be a bit more circumspect in how they used said agents.

UK to properly probe xAI to test if its revolting robo-smut generator broke the law

Idiot.

“...a tyrant and a traitor”

Hmm, it would seem as if Musk is firing from the lip again. How can anyone be both a tyrant and a traitor at the same time?

If someone is a tyrant, then they are, by definition in control of the the state. L'etat, c'est moi" as Louis XIV put it.

How then can a tyrant be a traitor? They would in effect be betraying themselves.

Maybe it was all the spittle coating the screen that stopped Musk reading what he had just written.

If he is so dumb why is he so rich?

DIY AI bot farm OpenClaw is a security 'dumpster fire'

Useless.

Others are noticing that keeping an AI assistant active 24/7 can be costly, and proposed various cost mitigation strategies.

The only mitigation strategy of any use is to switch the bloody things off.

Are people so forgetful and vapid that they need an "AI assistant" for the equivalent of wiping their arse?

Keep it simple, stupid: Agentic AI tools choke on complexity

Lovely.

...making financial transactions or controlling and managing industrial equipment.

Who do you sue when things got tits up? As they will.

A clearer recipe for disaster would be difficult to find.

EU looking into Elon Musk's X after Grok produces deepfake sex images

Re: I'm waiting for Musk

Putin, Pooh, Fatboi, Khamenei, Netanyahu, Lukashenko

Aren't most of them members of Trumps "Board of Peace"?

Such nice people Musk will fit right in.

eBay updates legalese to ban AI-powered shop-bots

Google, however, says retailers appreciate the agentic commerce tools it launched a couple of weeks ago.

Citation required.

UK gambling regulator accuses Meta of lying about its struggle to spot illegal ads

Not really.

Miller thinks Meta must decide whose side it is on.

Meta, and by that I mean Zuckerberg, are not interested in sides.

His only interest is in lines, more specifically the bottom one.

Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

It could be.

The firm hasn't offered much in the way of technical detail.

Quite possibly because they have no idea what the hell is going wrong.

Morons.

Dell wants £10m+ from VMware if Tesco case goes against it

Broadcom says it tried to offer Tesco a new deal,

One, I suppose, that they couldn't refuse.

There is a name for organisations who act like that.

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

Just so you know.

Apple's iTunes, on the other hand, recognized every CD we threw at it

So does Clementine on Linux.

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

Opinionated and badly spelt.

Marshall McLuhan had it right when he said "The media is the message."

Poor spelling, inattention to punctuation and general carelessness in writing conveys much more than the actual words.

Why should anyone listen to someone who cannot even express themselves in a coherent manner?

Finnish cops grill crew of ship suspected of undersea cable sabotage

The youth of today.

...a voluntary military service for its 18-year-olds, prompting widespread protests at schools across the country.

What in Hell's name are they protesting about?

A voluntary service is just that, voluntary. If you don't want to join, then don't join.

Tis the season when tech leaders rub their crystal balls

Not to mention the possibility of bad actor countries demanding access to whatever happens to be hosted, or even just passing through, their territory.

Could you be referring, amongst others, to the US? Given that their Cloud Act gives them the right to grab any data hosted by a US company no matter where it is located?

I do agree that the penny is now dropping that keeping you proprietary data on someone else's computer is a bad idea, but who would have thought that "On-prem" would be making a come-back?

Maybe your data is worth more than the cost of hosting it yourself.

Imagine there's no AI. It's easy if you try

Re: That's not survival. It is an unnecessary nightmare.

...the frame is the battery and the battery is the frame.

Err, no.

As Tron says above if the battery and the frame are one and the same then when the battery dies, as it will, so does the frame.

That is literally built in obsolescence.

One real reason AI isn't delivering: Meatbags in manglement

Re: Marketing

I disagree. It's no use making something and then not being able to sell it.

I know because I found myself in that position.

I started a tiny company which designed and made etched-brass items for model soldier enthusiasts. A fair bit of work on my part and a small outlay to get the parts made. Then I hit a brick wall, the people I was hoping would sell the parts backed out and I had nothing to replace them with. So the company folded and I was left with inventory that just sat there. Eventually I went to Ebay. It's not perfect but it at least helps me market what I have and get back some of the money invested, but not my time.

You may not like the tactics used by marketing departments but they are a distasteful necessity. Just like lawyers.

Keeping Windows and macOS alive past their sell-by date

...if you don't mind using US English.

That's alright.

As El Reg readers we have already been schooled in that variant of the English language thanks to the insistence on using "International English" on this site.

Workers should control the means of agentic production, suggests WorkBeaver boss

No, they are not!

...people are stupid.

Some might be, but the vast majority are not stupid.

They are unprepared and untrained.

How many job adverts in the past ten years had the proviso that candidates must be able to manipulate AI prompts and guide "agentic" AI?

Answer: None.

AI as we now know it is a very recent development so there are few to no knowledgable practitioners able to train the general workforce.

So to blame people for not knowing about how to handle AI *is* stupid and unless and until management work that out they are going to be floundering about wondering "Why am I not getting the benefits of AI that I was promised?"

Infinite Machine e-scooter is like the offspring of a Vespa and a Cybertruck

Musk's Cybertruck is illegal in the UK for a number of reasons one being the sharp angles and edges posing a threat to pedestrians.

This thing looks like it will follow the same way and I for one am very glad of the Construction and Use regulations in force in this country.

With luck we will never be afflicted with the sight of such a horrible thing.

Your car’s web browser may be on the road to cyber ruin

Re: I must be getting old ...

I do not even use the one in my mobile 'phone.

What is this mobile 'phone thing you are talking about?

Seriously, what is the compunction to get everything hooked up to a system known to be dangerous and a privacy nightmare?

I do not have a mobile 'phone and my car is old enough to have been built before all this IOT nonsense and I have no desire to "upgrade".

Welcome to America - now show us your last five years of social media posts

Pulling out the old foot-gun?

... but visitors from those nations may soon have to provide five years' worth of their social media history in order to gain entry.

Well that's me stuffed. I have never had any "social media" accounts so I would have to try and prove a negative.

Not that I have any burning desire to visit the US but this sort of nonsense would definitely put me off and, I suspect, it will a lot of people.

Has there been any sign that Russia is going to be treated more leniently that the UK and the EU? Putin definitely seems to be on Trump's Christmas card list.

If I ever made a trip to North America, Canada would be the place I would choose.

Bots, bias, and bunk: How can you tell what's real on the net?

"King" Hatshepsut

You are right.

She titled herself King and was referred to as such. The title Pharaoh, being from the Egyptian Per-ah meaning "Great House" came later and she couldn't have been called Queen as the title did not exist.

The same with "Prince", again not used for the Ancient Egyptian sons of the King. They were just "King's son".

she simply styled herself King and got herself a nice beard. Don't forget the bull's tail also worn by the king.

A case in point.

I use Youtube as a tool to research aircraft of WW2.

Just lately there have been a number of channels that have appeared purporting to give unusual insights into the subject, They are in the form of dialogue backed with still photos illustrating the points being covered.

The "photos" are the give-away. They are obviously AI generated with all the well known signs that they not the real thing. For example a picture supposedly showing a Mosquito bomber in German hands has a heavily framed nose piece. All Mosquito bombers and reconnaissance versions had a frameless moulded perspex dome, not the Germanic looking monstrosity shown. In an another video the wartime signs warning about careless talk etc. were pure gibberish.

The same goes for the commentary. It too seems to have been AI generated and I'm not even sure that the narrator was a human.

Now for someone like me all this sticks out like a sore thumb but for less experienced people the danger is that this fake information will spread and infect our sources such that we cannot any longer be sure what is real and what is fake.

It seems to me that this is all a "get rich quick" scheme and damn the consequences.

Pension portal launch fail sends Capita running to Microsoft for help

They what?

Capita Pensions are taking remedial action through seeking support from Microsoft...

You have to be kidding.

Crapita are turning to MS to sort their problems when MS can't even sort out their own?

Talk about the blind leading the blind.

Two paths to Enlightenment: AV Linux 25 and MX Moksha step forward

On the one hand.

Both have much to recommend them.

And one thing against them.

Any guesses?

Speccy clone storms back for Christmas without a shred of Sinclair code

Re: squishy "dead flesh" type keyboard

... keyboard to be truly decent and worthy of praise,

I had an Oric Atmos, still have it somewhere, that had a fantastic keyboard for its day.

Real keys with a lovely feedback, they were a decent size too.

A much better effort than the Oric 1 and if it had come to market sooner it would have given the Spectrum a run for its money.

Pebble, the e-ink smartwatch that refuses to die, just went fully open source

Re: Tempting! Bit square though..

I too like a mechanical watch, automatics preferred. No batteries, no charging all the time and they do what I need, tell the time.

I believe in the Unix philosophy, do one thing and do it well, so I don't have a smart phone, with all its distractions that they call apps. When I am out and about I don't want to be at the beck and call of all and sundry. Just leave me a voice message on my land line. I do have a thirty five year old Casio digital watch but there again it just tells the time.

Like Neil Barnes I too am old.

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

Re: Just say no...

I don't think that MS's focus is on the consumer sector anymore.

It seems to me that having a stranglehold on business customers is all they care about these days. Companies are so tied to the MS ecosystem with applications, business processes and legacy holdovers that they *can't* easily or cheaply get off the MS train. They are locked in and MS seeing that will continue their march towards an AI "paradise" whether their customers like it or not.

It's the old sunk cost fallacy. So much money invested, they have to get something out of it even if it means pumping even more money in. And someone else will have to pick up the bill.

Pegasus XL rocket dusted off to rescue NASA’s Swift observatory from fiery demise

So, sometimes the old solutions are the best solutions.

I do wish someone would tell that to the likes of Lennart Poettering.

Brits believe the bots even though study finds they're often talking nonsense

Of course.

Brits believe the bots even though study finds they're often talking nonsense

I'm not surprised, after all they have been electing politicians for years.

Microsoft's first Windows 10 ESU Patch Tuesday release fails for some

Really?

Pavan Davuluri boasted that the operating system was "evolving into an agentic OS."

I thought, naively, the the job of an OS was to get out of the way and let you use the PC as you see fit.

Sort of like a janitor going around dealing with all the messy little details like file systems and process control, so that you don't have to.

Instead this bozo is proposing that MS takes the reins and relegates you to an onlooker whilst your "agentic" OS does whatever MS has instructed it to do.

Instead of Windows being your servant MS now proposes that it would like to turn the OS into your co-equal if not your master.

That is likely to go down like a lead balloon when people find out what that actually means.

To 'Infinity' ... and beyond: MX Linux 25 has arrived

Or if you want get away from the Debian family you might take a look at PCLinuxOS.

That has KDE as its main desktop, amongst many others, and judging from what Texstar says will NEVER include systemd.

Try it, you might like it.

To solve compatibility issues, Microsoft would quietly patch other people's code

Of course not!

"Out of safety, the Windows 95 team got written permission from the vendor whenever they needed to patch a program."

Not to mention common courtesy.

You don't go messing about with other peoples' stuff without asking, do you MS?

Just asking for a friend who wonders why her preferences keep being reset every time MS emits patch or update.

Musk gets approval for bumper Tesla payout but, unlike his robot, there are strings attached

You choose.

Musk, accompanied by a dancing Optimus robot,

How could the audience tell the difference?

One is non-human and only works on pre-programmed inputs.

The other is a human simulacrum and cannot apprehend reality.

So, which was which?

VodafoneThree to offshore UK network jobs to India

Re: Offshoring surely needs testing at court!

...but it is okay if that new employee lives in another country?

I don't know, but when me and all the people I worked with got booted out for people from Bangalore they weren't working in another country, they just moved in and took over our desks.

Illegal? Maybe, but it didn't seem to matter to the company we worked at. Though as they are a huge American conglomerate I don't suppose anyone in the government was brave enough to challenge them on it.