Posts by David 132

Diversion to power datacenters earns Boom Supersonic a ticket to revive fast air transport

Of all the numbers, they picked that one?

"we had a signed deal for 1.21 gigawatts"

Great Scott!

Block all AI browsers for the foreseeable future: Gartner

Re: The best use of AI

Ah yes, the "Test Out" option - "You can skip straight to the test at the end, but if you fail to score 80% or more you will have to sit through the training in full..."

My pet peeve about those trainings was that the creators always felt that presenting the content as role-play scenarios was a good way to make the training more "interesting".

Having to watch a series of mini telenovelas ("Amir is in Marketing. His colleague Shauna has come to him with a great idea for boosting Q3 sales. Watch and listen as they discuss it at length, then choose whether you think Shauna's idea is compliant...") that took 5 minutes to communicate a point - "don't offer kickbacks" - that could have been communicated in one bullet point, was tedious in the extreme.

Re: The best use of AI

Over many years' career at a certain very large tech company, I had to complete a stack of mandatory trainings each year: Anti-Corruption, Compliance, Ethics, and so on. My managers (who were, without exception, great people) and I derived a lot of entertainment from me coming up with an explanation of how I'd done the training, and ticking as many "violation" boxes in my explanation as possible.

I think by the end, it was something like, "Yes boss, I bribed the underage son of a North Korean government espionage agent in embezzled Bitcoin to do the training for me by posting it on the public Internet and promised him an internship in return". Or words to that effect. The aim was to show that I had, actually, absorbed the details of what behaviours were verboten :)

Yes, my bosses had my sense of humour. Fortunately!

Porsche panic in Russia as pricey status symbols forget how to car

Re: /me looks at his thirty year old Fiat

Bravo!

...or should that be Brava!, or Punto!, or Multipla! ....?

Classic MacOS for non-Apple PowerPC kit rediscovered

Re: CHRP alternatives were all better than Apple kit

On the whole whilst booting from CD would be a novelty on a PC in 1995...

...aaaand unbidden, the term "El Torito" popped straight into my head as though it were only yesterday. Ugh.

I made a lot of accidental coasters trying to make bootable CDs back in the day. Thank Nuggan for progress in the form of USB thumbdrives!

Windows Insiders get a glimpse of Microsoft’s agentic future

Re: Wrong

Can we do "what could go right" instead? It's a much shorter list and easier to come up with.

Cloudflare blames Friday outage on borked fix for React2shell vuln

"How do we tell them apart?"

A solved problem. RFC3514.

Linux 6.18 crowned LTS kernel – and Alpine 3.23 wastes no time adopting it

Re: Alpine additional

I think the Reg forums were having a lie-down for a day or two. I noticed that votes weren’t sticking and many stories’ comments pages were 404.

I used the Corrections link on one of the stories that wasn’t 404 to let them know, although I’m sure they were already well aware.

Microsoft 365 boosts prices in 2026 … to pay for more AI and security

Re: Micro$oft getting old

"You make a grown man cry..."

Tech leaders fill $1T AI bubble, insist it doesn't exist

Likewise his "Right now, I don't see any signs of a slowdown based on the projects that are in the market right now and the conversations and the plans that we're talking about with our customers..." - definite shades of Admiral Nelson's "I see no ships!" whilst holding the telescope to his eyepatch...

And the old quote, (paraphrasing) "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his livelihood depends on him not understanding it", of course.

Latest Windows 11 updates may break the OS's most basic bits

The Laptop Of Theseus?

(Or "Trigger's Laptop", for the non-Classicists among us, I suppose)

Re: I really try to not be that guy

they have this churn under control

Blame my lack of glasses, or poor choice of font kerning, but I read that as “chum”, i.e. macerated fish guts. Which is also a rather apt description of Windows.

Chances are that if it’s 7 years old as you say, it’ll have a replaceable WiFi card (if you’re really lucky, accessible by merely removing a hatch in the lower case). Decent Intel ones are available on Amazon in the $15-30 range, but be careful to match the edge-connector and antenna type/count of your existing one.

John Henry still leading the race vs AI in customer service

"...but there's nothing so lonesome, morbid or drear

Than to stand in the bar, of a Pub With No Beer..."

China using AI as ‘precision instrument’ of censorship and repression, at home and abroad

Re: Clearly the "Silly Season"

ASPI and TWAIN. Those were the days!

Poop-peeping toilet attachment has a different definition of 'end-to-end' encryption

Re: Down the pan...

A double S in "asinine" in this case, surely?

Aaargh thank you for reminding me of Eurotrash with Jean-Paul Gaultier, Antoine de Caunes… and “Pipi and Popo”.

“‘Allo my eeenglish chums…”

Micron ditches consumer memory brand Crucial to chase AI riches

Re: Damn.

I do seem to have spoken for us all there don't I?

I hear good things about Corsair, although they do seem to cater more to the RGB LEDs crowd, rather than boring old farts like myself. Guess I'll be giving them a try!

Re: Fire sales soon?

That’d be nice, although as someone pointed out recently here, most of the GPUs being sold by the tens of thousands for the AI South Sea Bubble lack video output ports & components, so would be near-useless for anything else.

Damn.

After being burned countless times with other brands, ranging from (supposedly) top-tier down to aliexpress-level Scrabble-tile-named ones, I switched to Crucial about 25 years ago (eek - that’s a quarter of a century!) and have never even ONCE had a compatibility issue or failure with them in all that time.

Anyone got a recommendation for consumer-level memory brands that don’t suck? I couldn’t care less about RGB LEDs or overclocking or kewld00d branding or fancy show-off heatsinks.

Alas I have even had issues with the likes of Kingston and Samsung before now, although admittedly, many years ago before I went all-Crucial!

Lawyer's 6-year-old son uses AI to build copyright infringement generator

The truly terrifying aspect to this story is that apparently we (society) are allowing copyright lawyers to breed.

That poor child has a heavy cross to bear in later life! To paraphrase the old joke, “I tell people my dad was a piano-player in a brothel… how can I possibly tell them the truth?”

KDE Plasma sets date to dump X11 as Wayland push accelerates

Re: Man o man

Wasn't me that downvoted you - there's clearly a member of the Wayland Cult been lurking around here - but I query your opening paragraph:

VNC has been generally broken for a while. It stopped being a good solution for me long before I moved to Wayland. I think the current meta for video playback etc is MPV for a lot of folks...MPV is what VLC used to be...as in "it just opens any video file".

Are you perhaps confusing VNC (the remote keyboard/video/mouse redirection app, and what people above were discussing) with VLC, the media player?

Re: Man o man

"Why the fsck do people keep doing this? Design a worse product and somehow persuade the major Linux distributions to use it by default? I hope Clement LeFebre is taking notes and sticking to X11..."

This process is to be honoured (!) with the inaugural Lennart Poettering Prize For Progressive Sabotage; the trophy is in the shape of a triangular wheel & tyre...

Windows keeps obsolete strings forever to avoid breaking translations

Re: I remember...

“Microsoft used to issue a translation dictionary on diskette including all the standard terms & phrases in a large number of languages”

Ah yes, that explains the error dialog…

My Hovercraft Is Full Of Eels (C:\Windows\System32)

[OK] [Cancel]

FCC sounds alarm after emergency tones turned into potty-mouthed radio takeover

"Je t'aime (Moi Non Plus)" by Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg?

Apparently my grasp of what is "vulgar" is a little out of date :)

Seven years later, Airbus is still trying to kick its Microsoft habit

Re: 20 million cells?!

My first thought too.

Obligatory XKCD!

Airbus: We were hours from pausing production in Spain

Re: Paying a premium for fuel

Shades of what seems to happen in the UK with regularity every winter, wherein the cry goes up from hard-pressed council tax payers: “why has the profligate council spent vast amounts of money on snowploughs, which never get used because we never get snow?”

…followed inevitably a winter or two later, by “why did the short-sighted council sell off its snowploughs, there’s been heavy snowfall and all the roads are impassable…”

Old-school rotary phone dials into online meetings, hangs up when you slam it down

Heh, I have you beaten by about 20 years - I have one of these mounted on my kitchen wall. Non-functional (albeit, in much better condition than the one shown at the above link); one of these days, when I Get A Round Tuit, I'll put a Raspberry Pi or something in there and make it a functional Wifi intercom. Its construction is a masterclass in turn-of-the-century electrical design; wires routed through grooves milled into the wood, and held in place by blobs of candle-wax.

Vibe coding: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing (Sorry, Linus)

Re: different results over time for exactly the same prompts

Don't worry; with vibe coding and AI in general, there's no gnarly riptides - only lots of hand-waves.

Google links Android’s Quick Share to Apple’s AirDrop, without Cupertino’s help

Re: Why bother?

VLC on iPhone ditto; a web server and a network share browser. That's how I transfer music nowadays; I gave up on iTunes or Music or whatever Apple now call it a long time ago.

Scientific computing is about to get a massive injection of AI

AI Gavage. Good analogy.

Or perhaps that should be “GavAIge”.

AI nudification site fined £55K for skipping age checks

More like in my case, "Thank you for successfully completing the age verification. As a result of the information you've submitted, we're redirecting you from sexy-nudes-dot-com to a site offering good deals on woolly cardigans & Werthers Originals."

Re: And so it begins .....

Sounds like the punchline to the old joke about the farmer caught in flagrante with his Massey Ferguson, after his marriage guidance counsellor told him that to win his wife's affections back, he should "act sexy to attract 'er"

(Yes, it's a joke that works better spoken than in print...)

Magician forgets password to his own hand after RFID chip implant

Nailed it.

And as far as finger-related puns go, I really can’t think of thumbthing else.

Thunderbird 145 finally adds ‘native’ Exchange support

Re: Why was this page unavailable ?

Yes, I got a 404 when I tried to open the Comments page for another story here today.

Not to mention that on the Comments pages, half the time I get the old "Alert the Moderatrix - the coders need whipping" when I try to vote, and then any up/downvotes that I thought HAD been recorded, disappear when I reload the page.

Edit: Ironically enough, I got a 404 when I clicked to submit this comment! But it did post, apparently...

Ford rolls into the Xen Project as hypervisor gears up for autos

Re: Cars already have too many computer controlled functions

Occasionally the whole touchscreen goes black

Consider yourself lucky.

My wife's Disco uses embedded Microsoft Windows.

When the infotainment computer failed a couple of years ago, not only did she lose: radio, CD, bluetooth, satnav, cameras, and parking sensors... but, because it's Windows, it would attempt to boot up, blue-screen, reboot, blue-screen, reboot... ad infinitum.

Sounds like a bad joke, but it's true.

Have you any idea how annoying it is to try and drive with a large, bright-blue screen flashing in your peripheral vision every 10 seconds or so?

Re: Coming soon to your car

Especially in the seams under the headlights, and along the bottom of the door skins :(

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: WARP

Or pick up the mouse, and use it as a microphone to say “Hello, Computer”?

Windows boss defends 'agentic OS' push as users plead for reliability

Re: The problem is ...

"You don't even need another computer to test it on providing you've got one with enough disk to spare to install it dual boot."

I venture that even that isn't necessary - these days, just grab a USB key of sufficient size and run the Live version of the distro if there's one available. No need to indulge in the chainsaw-juggling that is - despite all the modern safeguards - repartitioning a drive.

Control Panel is a Johnny-come-lately newcomer.

Even on the latest Windows 11, go to ODBC Data Sources (32-bit) and start clicking around... various Windows 3.1-era dialog boxes and file pickers, clearly scarcely touched in the intervening 30+ years, are lurking there.

Plus, half of it is in Portuguese for some reason on my (US English only) system - "go figure" as they say, or should that be "vai entender"...

Retro Games opens pre-orders for THEA1200, a full-size working Amiga replica

“it's shipped 7 machines so far”

From context, I hope you mean “7 models of machine”, otherwise that’s not much of a revenue stream :)

Apple knits up $230 sock for your iPhone in time for Christmas

And if you say “Airpods Pros”, you sound like Sal in Futurama.

“I gots your airpods pros rights heres!”

VLC's keeper of the cone nets European free software gong

From the article: “VLC's icon, a traffic cone – which the program automatically festoons with decorations during the holiday season.:.”

I remember reading a year or three ago that there were bugs filed against VLC because some humourless grinches out there resented the festive icon-change. Can’t remember if it was on grounds of “confusing users” or “cultural sensitivity” but… screw-ge them. Long may VLC continue!

Rocket Lab's Neutron slips to 2026: 'Our aim is to make it to orbit on the first try'

Actually from the lead photo I was thinking it looks like my wife’s electric hair curler!

UK asks cyberspies to probe whether Chinese buses can be switched off remotely

Re: Free software the answer

You owe me a new keyboard.

Secret setting hints haptic feedback coming to Windows 11 UI

Cue the inevitable "Hey! I work as IT Administrator in an industrial chemicals plant and my users often operate their trackpads and mice whilst holding Erlenmeyer flasks full of nitroglycerine, you insensitive silly person!"

Icon ---->

OpenAI API moonlights as malware HQ in Microsoft’s latest discovery

Re: Oh yeah?

The standard approach to writing software seems to be:

1) make it work

2) make it stable

3) (optional) make it secure

Problem is that when the money starts flooding in somewhere after step (1), steps 2 and certainly 3 are often put on the "why bother?" pile.

IBM cutting several thousand jobs in latest layoffs

Re: How is this even news?

What I want to know, and what the article doesn't mention, is - what's the average age of those being laid off, relative to the age of their peers?

I suspect this is IBM up to their infamous "dinobabies" tricks again.

M&S pegs cyberattack cleanup costs at £136M as profits slump

Re: zero sympathy

"and because a lot of people are working in corridors"

Wait, what? Is this some bizarre gesture to show solidarity with the NHS?

Win10 still clings to over 40% of devices weeks after Microsoft pulls support

Re: Bloat like never seen before

Yeah, I know, "unpolluted" is a relative term, as is "as snappy as Windows 10"... damning with faint praise, surely.

But you know what I meant, I hope.