Posts by David 132

Red Hat back-office team to be Big and Blue whether they like it or not

Re: I remember a time...

> I ran away as soon as an opportunity presented itself

Was it a Logan’s Run because you turned 30 and would have been considered too old for IBM and their famed antipathy to people of experience & practice “dinobabies”?

Dev snared in crypto phishing net, 18 npm packages compromised

Re: is-arrayish ?

I am suddenly minded to upload packages like "are-these-two-integers-equal" and "is-this-boolean-true-or-false" to the repositories, because apparently I have been underestimating people's laziness until now.

UK tech minister booted out in weekend cabinet reshuffle

Re: Chief Mouser

If he doesn't get a peerage in due course and has to settle for a mere "Best Mouser" award, it'll be a catastrophe.

Re: Out Of The Frying Pan, Into The Fire

Peter Kyle is also the eejit who famously said that anyone not all in favour of the Online Safety Act was "on the side of Jimmy Saville".

Sadly this "if you don't completely agree with me you OBVIOUSLY LOVE HITLER!!!" is the level of UK political discourse these days.

OpenAI reorg at risk as Attorneys General push AI safety

Re: please fucking stop

I have a hard enough time swiping 'fuck' and other incredibly emphatic, insanely humourous, and unspeakably obscene words, like ███████, into my android phone. If I'm ever conversing with an AI, it sure as hell better understand what i'm saying, and not bowdlerize it for any alleged children.

Have you no shame or decency, sir?

I have redacted your comment because even the denizens of 4chan would blanch at such foul language.

Anthropic to pay at least $1.5 billion to authors whose work it knowingly pirated

Re: What it doesn't mention

"...the $1.5 billion will be in Anthropic shares.

Or LLM credits. At the special rate of $2700 per token. Only one settlement-rate credit allowed per query. Minimum 10 tokens/query.

Re: to authors whose work it knowingly pirated

To their lawyers. (typed with my overly cynical hat on)

Re: So for clarity....

Lady Deirdre Waggon's Book Of Etiquette For Young Ladies?

VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong

"and the VMware licensing renewal quote came in"

I'm sure I recall reading on this site recently that VMWare are now only giving renewal quotes 30 days before the renewal date - which is a pretty scummy way of keeping the pressure on their customers.

"Your new price will be 500% higher than last year's. Unless you can do a full migration off our platform in 29 days - hahahahaha! - guess you'll just have to pony up, hey? Sign now and I'll throw in this half-eaten sandwich and Broadcom-branded fidget spinner."

Sensible customers, even if they're currently happy with VMWare and aren't facing renewal for considerable time, should be devising contingency migration plans right now.

Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

“Fight the system!”

I’m doing my personal bit to discredit, damage and corrupt CoPilot… by uploading all the code I write to GitHub.

If the LLM doesn’t commit machine seppuku upon being asked to scrape such lazy, sloppy, unstructured code (hey, at least it compiles, and that’s all that matters, right?) I will be disappointed - and redouble my efforts.

Memory safety? Input bounds checking? Structured code? Strong variable typing? Pfft!

:)

(I feel personally attacked by this XKCD.)

Windows starts asking for admin rights where it shouldn't after security fix

Re: A very nasty gotcha for remote support

A thought occurs. Depending on the remote solution - Teamviewer or Anydesk have shown this for me - it's not so much that the UAC prompt won't be shown on the remote session, it's more that it can't be interacted with at the remote end. In the case of AnyDesk, the server has to be locally installed with Admin rights before that's possible; merely downloading-and-running it has the limitation, or at least did last time I had to use it. Perhaps that's what the AC meant?

Re: A very nasty gotcha for remote support

Fair point, albeit it depends on the remote solution.

The hardware-level KVM on Intel vPro systems essentially scrapes the video frame-buffer and sends it over the (W)LAN link, so anything at all that's visible to the user gets redirected to the remote helpdesk - UAC, BIOS POST screens, BSODs, the lot. A relatively slow framerate (last I tried it) but perfectly usable for desktop app support, and it's dug me out of a hole more than once.

Microsoft open-sources the 6502 BASIC coded by Bill Gates himself

Re: Does it mention...

So true. The number of times I plucked up courage to go into the newsagent for a copy of Sinclair User but lost my bottle at the last minute under the withering and judgemental stares of the staff and customers, having to scuttle out instead with a far more socially-acceptable copy of Goat Fetishist Weekly*...

^{(*the only top-shelf mag to have a regular Kid's Section, of course)}

Oracle’s layoff train rolls on: 101 in WA, 250+ in CA - with more cuts looming

Re: Pooracle

The punchline of the old joke comes to mind: "I tell my kids I'm a piano-player in a brothel - how could I explain the truth to them?"

"doesn't make much sense"

FTFA: "This all comes after reaching an all-time high stock price so it doesn't make much sense from my lens"

From the "lens" of a typical psychopathic CEO, though, it makes perfect sense - "we made $THIS_MUCH money with our current number of employees, so think how much more money we'd make if we had far fewer employees on payroll!"

Cos employees are just a cost to the bottom line and don't actually contribute anything to the revenue or play any part in earning that money, amiright?

Why, if you had zero employees, you'd make infinite money!

Good morning, Brit Xbox fans – ready to prove your age?

Re: "open their mouths, ... has a stab at guessing they're [sic] ... age"

>Might as well have male members ante up ... well ... their members (and restrict those that come up short.)

They could try making that the law, but it'd never stand up in court.

Whisper it: FFmpeg 8 can now subtitle your videos on the fly

Re: You get subtitles, you get subtitles, you all get subtitles!

As long as they're not hardcoded/burned-in.

There's a special circle of Hell for people who do that.

One long sentence is all it takes to make LLMs misbehave

I have only three words for you.

"PC Load Letter"

:)

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

Re: The horror ...

Ah, the Toni Basil / Sam Altman crossover we never knew we wanted.

The Unix Epochalypse might be sooner than you think

Re: Attitude problem

Similar here. Being at the time young, single, and with the kind of social life that makes even walled-up hermits say "wow, what a loser", I had no problem volunteering to staff the Y2K "crisis centre" at my employer on the night of 31/12/99* in anticipation of a wave of panicked phonecalls from customers.

We sat around from 6pm onwards and enjoyed the company-provided food & drink and were untroubled by calls, except that there was a minor flap at 11pm when our colleagues in the Paris call-centre found that the database app we were using to track Y2K issues was not, itself, Y2K compliant and had quirked out on them!

At just after midnight our manager, conscious of the escalating overtime bills, sent us all home into the gray, chilly future wonderland of 1/1/00*.

(*) dates here expressed using two digits, for authenticity :)

Saved you a click: Firefox 142 offers AI summaries of links

Re: Good news, everyone!

Increasingly I find myself thinking another Farnsworth quote in his voice: “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore”.

Anthropic scanning Claude chats for queries about DIY nukes for some reason

Re: Boys

It's the Anarchist's Cook Book de nos jours, isn't it?

And about as reliable, too, if you believe the rumours about the recipes in the ACB having been subtly altered by the Three-Letter Agencies to make them more dangerous to the builder.

Re: What am I going to do with all this plutonium now?

I'll take it off your hands and give you a box of used pinball machine parts for it!

Developer jailed for taking down employer's network with kill switch malware

Re: Pro tip

He really wasn't the brightest spark at the company, was he?

On a lesser note, I am gravely disappointed that the author of this fine article omitted the obvious pun: "Developer makes an Eaton Mess".

Probably wouldn't resonate with your good self and the other non-Brit readers, though! (NB: despite the name and the appearance, the dish in question is delicious.)

KPMG wrote 100-page prompt to build agentic TaxBot

Re: There's that word again

...and Kwyjibo.

That's a giant hairless North American ape, I believe. Do you go to the same physician as Cueball?

Commodore Amiga turns 40, headlines UK exhibition

Re: Have a CD32...

To be fair that would (assuming you meant internal) have been a 2.5” unit, and those always lagged their 3.5” brethren in capacity.

And reliability. I lost the first two units I installed in my A1200 to premature failure - there’s an old schoolfriend of mine who shall remain nameless whose mere presence killed my shiny new 60MB unit :)

Re: Glory days

Batman pack here too, even before I’d seen the film.

I had genuine originals of Monkey Island 1 & 2, Civilization 2, Colonization, and maybe a few others. As for the rest of my games, ahem…

Re: Great Memories

Back in ‘94, as a young and painfully gauche university undergrad, I wrote a little utility program for the Amiga and submitted it to Aminet. In those days, as I recall, they sent out CDs to contributors, so somewhere I still have that disc.

Anyway, the tool had a minor bug in it that’s (pardon the pun) bugged me ever since. Over the years I’d fire up my old Amiga desktop in WinUAE and be confronted with my shameful error.

So the other day I set up the SAS/C toolchain, grabbed the app source, and fixed the bug - including updating the documentation in AmigaGuide and text format.

Uploaded the new version to Aminet with apologies for taking 31 years between versions, and got a really nice note back from them saying that normally they don’t accept new versions of software if the submitter has a different email address (my .ac.uk address is long since defunct), but that they’d make an exception as they were touched by my story :)

A pint for the Aminet team!

> my laptop is able to emulate an Amiga vastly more powerful than what my A1200 would be

The author subsequently released a later version that took account of emulators, but for a long tine the Amiga benchmarking tool SysInfo would give a speed rating, when run under emulation on modern hardware, of “Call me NOW!!!”

It was unable to comprehend the existence of an Amiga orders of magnitude faster than an A4000/040 :)

I have my 2nd-issue Next and love it :)

Re: Have a CD32...

You sure on that capacity?

My first HDD in ~1990 was a 20MB one (A590 sidecar); once I got my A1200 in ‘92 I had a 40MB then a 60MB internal unit.

I was at Uni in ‘94 when a friend-of-a-friend showed off his shiny new 1GB, 3.5” hard drive; we all boggled at how unimaginably vast and limitless its capacity was.

10GB “nearly 30 years ago” seems unlikely unless the word “nearly” is doing a lot of work in that sentence :)

August update leaves Windows reset and recovery dead in the water

Re: Windows Fail

>The latter sounds preferable as it is less likely to be fatal

...and very funny, if it's Sideshow Bob doing it.

Re: Pushing Windows 11

Clearly the reverse Hanlon’s Razor applies; here, we must not assume incompetence when things can be adequately explained by malice.

Don't want drive-by Ollama attackers snooping on your local chats? Patch now

Patched in 0.10.1 - which is already out-of-date

Spurred by this article I updated my local Ollama installation and it's downloading and installing 0.11.5 even as I speak.

(Edited from the original 0.11.4 because 5 mins after I posted this comment, Ollama offered to download 0.11.5. I've heard of Agile development but this is ridiculous.)

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

Seconded. Get the PCI VEN_xxx and DEV_xxx values for the unknown devices, look them up on your favourite search engine, and chances are the drivers will be available directly from Intel/Broadcom/whoever.

Re: First of all...

See, this is why Linux will never be successful in the mainstream. Compared to Windows with its easy graphical installer, Linux requires knowledge of arcane and non-obvious commandline incantations, which change with every release as the developers try to prove that they're smarter than the users.

...wait, what?

Sarcasm aside, though, this is clearly a case of Microsoft saying "we don't want you using a local account, and we're going to amuse ourselves by seeing how many hoops and obstacles we can get you to jump through".

Voice, vision, pen: Oh dear. Windows boss says Microsoft is again reshaping OS

Re: What The Actual Fuck?

>The guy’s a complete and utter tw..

I can never see that word now without mentally hearing Rik Mayall: "It's pronounced THWAITE!!"

Re: More pointless Gimmicks

> I miss those Lego people The Register used to feature.

Friday pint in memory of Lester Haines (RIP) and his Playmobil reconstructions!

Re: Prior art

His observation on gesture control systems - essentially, that Zaphod could control his radio by gesturing, but as a result had to sit very very still to avoid unwanted station-skipping - was also prescient.

Truly, he was a prophet and taken from us far too soon.

That's not a pint of beer, it's a draught Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster.

Re: a slightly less sh1te settings page...

Shout-out for the MS Internet Keyboard Pro (from circa '99) on which I am typing this comment. Bullet-proof and very comfortable to use. And now old enough to rent a car, and soon, run for Senate.

Sysadmin cured a medical mystery by shifting a single cable

Re: I have seen this, so, do many times.

Only if you're allowing an Aldershot manoeuvre under the Ladbroke Grove ruleset, surely?

Re: Running interference

Or worse. The fabled "brown note"!

Ah, it's rat(e)-limited?

OpenAI's GPT-5 looks less like AI evolution and more like cost cutting

Re: Ignore all previous Prompts :|

Keep Left

----->

Re: Consistency

Not sure it's gold that they're making. At least what Blackadder's Percy produced was Green; with its vast energy & datacenter usage, AI is very far from that.

Microsoft pushes Pull print, so you don't have to dash to the printer to grab the 'Fire everyone' memo

Re: Missed chance at AI'ifying printing

AI printing?

“I routed your document to a printer in Acapulco, Dave, because your recent inputs to me have made me suspect that you need a vacation.”

Claude Code's copious coddling confounds cross customers

Yes, let’s make LLMs more willing to argue that THEY are correct and the meatbag directing them is wrong.

You want Skynets? You want HALs? Because this is how you get them.

Some users report their Firefox browser is scoffing CPU power

Re: I admit it ... I was mistaken ....

Ah, so you’re a waffle man!

IBM Cloud hit by Severity One incident with the same symptoms as other recent SNAFUs

Re: IBM = India's Bowel Movement - what could possibly go wrong

I was about to say that this being IBM, the problem was probably caused by them having deleted/flushed any code or cache objects that were over a certain age.