Posts by David 132

Users advised to review Oracle Java use as Big Red's year end approaches

Re: Quote from Larry Ellison

"Oracle doesn't have customers - it has hostages".

Many a true word spoken in jest...

Re: Demolition Man

One of the best Stallone films ever. It was perhaps the start of his "I'm not going to take myself too seriously" phase and all the better for it.

You think ransomware is bad now? Wait until it infects CPUs

Compromise. Plant the livestock. As a bonus - self-fertilising.

My earlier attempt to compromise - free-range potatoes - didn't work out so well, but this one's a winner. Y-Combinator, here I come for that seed (ahaha) funding!

Obligatory XKCD.

Re: Physical Write-Protect Switches

:)

I assume you're riffing on the recently-covered Chromebook Paperclip Challenge that has seen kids everywhere short-circuit their school-issued laptops?

I'm not sure what is more to blame - the deviousness of the Chinese for unleashing TikTok, or the sheer paint-licking, mouth-breathing, uncontrollable-drooling feckwittedness of the TikTok users who see something like "The Pencil Challenge! How Many Pencils Can You Cram Point-First Up Your Nose???" and think "wow, that sounds so cool, that'll earn me the respect and adoration of my classmates!"

Re: Physical Write-Protect Switches

Speaking of… I had a news (well, “lifestyle” I suppose) article forwarded to me recently about how the Hot New Trend for restaurants is to have their own bespoke cutlery. Twigs & tweezers were the most Nathan Barley of the examples shown, but it quoted several restaurants who have a local smithy hand-forge pieces for them. Honestly most of the ones shown looked more like medieval torture implements or dental devices (“this happy little fellow is the Gouger…”) than something you’d want to put anywhere near your mouth. But then I suppose if you’re charging people £150 for a small dollop of cuckoo pith foamed essence of white truffle, your temptation would be “let’s see just how far we can push this before the suckers cotton on”…

Re: Pay us money to unlock the other CPUs and memory.

> serious random money

$4 every time?

OS-busting bug so bad that Microsoft blocks Windows Insider release

Re: HOW DID IT GET MERGED INTO THE TREE AT ALL?

Given the quality of recent Windows releases, it would indeed be a bulge in the Speedos… just not in the front.

Re: Where is the website suggesting more outlandish uses for AI ?

AI toilet paper with a Genuine People Personality?

The 12 KB that Windows just can't seem to quit

Re: Allo Allo

That’s not the wurst explanation I’ve heard.

Re: Icon fun

Oh dear, the reverberations from yesterday’s Deutsche Bank story continue… we’re back to discussion of 19-inch racks…

PowerSchool paid thieves to delete stolen student, teacher data. Looks like crooks lied

That's what I've been saying for years; see how plane hijackings dried up like spit on a hot stove in the early-mid 80s once Western governments made it very clear that they would not negotiate with hijackers or pay ransoms (a lesson that is starting to be forgotten, alas).

The usual counter-argument is that it would discourage companies from public disclosure of such attacks. Which could surely be mitigated against by governments offering really large bounties (funded by subsequent fines on the company) for any whistleblower who comes forward with evidence that their employer suffered an attack and chose to keep it quiet.

Re: Yes...

I have a copy of the data, all the gigabytes of it, and have no moral compunction whatsoever about making an archive of it - highly compressed, of course - available to the assembled Reg commentariat:

1

There you go. Decompression is left as an exercise for the reader.

Politicians. Thank goodness our politicians remain a beacon of total probity, candour, and flawless ethical behaviour.

Nurse! My dried frog pills!

Top sci-fi convention gets an earful from authors after using AI to screen panelists

Re: Detector triggered...

So what you’re saying is that although we may have created machines that pass the Turing test, we now have to deal with those humans who don’t?

He does, however, surreptitiously distribute tickets to amateur dramatic productions, which puts him beyond the pale. His dabbling in Necrom… Post Mortem Communications is a mere peccadillo.

Computacenter IT guy let girlfriend into Deutsche Bank server rooms, says fired whistleblower

"What was the plan, showing her his big iron?"

There's also a "now show me your impressive rack" joke there, but I'm far too much of a gentleman to make it.

Microsoft tries to knife passwords once and for all – at least for consumers

Re: M$ Wants Biometric ID - Sure Hold-on a second ... - NOT.

*goes to what3words to look that up, is disappointed to find that it's a corner of a small industrial unit just outside Peebles*

Re: Windows is no longer an option.

Yep. "Our site only supports Windows/Mac" is this decade's "Works Best With Internet Explorer At 800x600!! Under Construction!! Join Our WebRing!". (and if I could have put a <blink> tag in there I'd have done so.)

Soviet probe from 1972 set to return to Earth ... in May 2025

Re: Well at least it's not a million to one chance

But Ogilvy the astronomer has assured me we are in no danger. “The chances of anything coming from Mars the 206 x 9,800 km orbit are a million-to-one”, he said…

Re: If it lands on Trump...

Bow down, Mister!

Re: I'm not a statistician, but....

At that speed, any person it hits will behave more like a liquid than a solid.

British govt agents step in as Harrods becomes third mega retailer under cyberattack

Re: M&S Store shopping - no stock at the best of times

> If only they'd produce half their trousers in even leg lengths, and the other half in odds.

So... the right leg 29" and the left leg 30"?

<Kryten>

An excellent suggestion, sir, with just two minor drawbacks...

</Kryten>

Siri? Will tariffs hurt Apple? Tim Cook says brace for a $900M whack, for starters

Re: I'll never understand the stock market

'Twas ever thus. Back when I worked for a very large tech company, quarterly results would follow a predictable pattern.

The consensus analyst estimate would be (say) £0.20 EPS. Except there'd always be one analyst who was smoking something and would predict some wildly unrealistic number like £50.00 EPS.

Our results would come in and exceed the consensus. Except that because we'd fallen short of the fever-dream numbers of that one outlier.... our stock would dip.

A few days late, our main competitor would come out with their own numbers. They'd usually lost slightly less money than the analysts predicted... so their stock would bump upwards.

I gave up trying to predict the markets.

Disney Slack attack wasn't Russian protesters, just a Cali dude with malware

Re: Note to a Hack

You're clearly not a Cockney.

"A" for 'orses, "B" for Mutton, etc etc...

Your graphics card's so fat, it's got its own gravity alert

Ah, I see you favour the Extreme Freecell variant, played with two decks of cards and a revolver.

Re: I have no corpse...

A strange game.

The only winning move is not to play.

"every single leaf in the background to be properly rendered"

Pfft. n00b. I want the cellular mitochondria of the leaves to be accurately rendered. It's the mark of a true gamer.

Plus, it gives me something pretty to look at when my corpse is lying on the ground staring sightlessly, awaiting respawn. Which is my normal state in most games.*

*even Freecell. Does that strike anyone else as odd?

Re: 3kg ?

Oh, you're a bad influence. Browsing those Zima products has given me bad thoughts involving my wallet and my earmarked beer budget for the next year or two.

Re: Card orientation

That would be a desktop case then.

Yes, it's been done, but mini-towers seem to be the preferred form-factor/orientation these days.

Ah, now I am pining for my old Amiga 2500 and 4000 - probably the last desktop-factor systems I had.

Bonus points if you have Lego minifigs standing atop the tower and actually holding the card PCB edge!

Re: Ditto

In my "gaming" machine I have a slightly elderly Radeon RX580, which doesn't seem to struggle with any of the titles I play at 1080p; the most demanding ones I'm playing right now are Wreckfest and Grim Dawn. Yes, those titles are also slightly elderly, but then... so am I, so it's a perfect match.

I've been toying with replacing the card, but mainly to reduce power consumption rather than for any performance shortcomings.

For everything else I do, integrated Intel graphics are more than adequate, despite the dismal - and justified, let's be fair - reputation of their early offerings. Their hardware video encoding works great in both Handbrake and Jellyfin.

KDE 3 lives to fight another day as Trinity Desktop 14.1.4 hits the shelves

Re: Well done Trinity.

Liam for Pope.

He even speaks some Latin.

30 percent of some Microsoft code now written by AI - especially the new stuff

Re: Microsoft Works

They had to scrap it, because the phrase “Microsoft Works” fell foul of Truth In Advertising laws.

Re: Error Handling?

Not dogfood. Other end of the dog.

Re: Number game bullshit

“…it doesn’t compile, let’s put it in production anyway and fix it next Patch Tuesday.”

Cook'd: Judge says Apple lied to court in Epic case, asks Feds to mull criminal charges

Re: Wow.

"Over hear"?

I can only assume that I had a senior moment, or was distracted by [wife/goat/ducks/flatulent dog] when typing that.

And now that the edit window's passed, my shame will be a matter of record for ever.

Go on, laugh at me. I deserve it.

Wow.

That is unusually blunt talk from a judge.

Your move, Apple - I'll be over hear munching popcorn.

Maryland man pleads guilty to outsourcing US govt work to North Korean dev in China

Re: Outsourced - but fraud?

> Lying on - sorry, embellishing a - CV is hardly breaking news

As I read somewhere recently, and indeed may have already quoted somewhere else on this site...

Me in real life: "I flip burgers at McDonald's and in the evenings, play XBox."

Me on LinkedIn: "I deliver personalized solutions in the competitive and challenging retail nutrition segment, and in my free time investigate and evaluate artificial virtual environments"

Interviews??

FTA: "...qualifications Vong did not possess. In reality, he worked at a nail salon in Bowie, Maryland. Vong participated in multiple job interviews to land the position..."

Vong did the interviews? Or his North Korean alter-ego did them? Because I can't quite see how a nail salon worker whose claimed experience/qualifications were made-up, could then ace a live interview for a government software contractor. Hell, I did several interviews when I was recently job-hunting in the IT field, and the questions I was asked tended to be a little more challenging than "what oil is best for softening cuticles / how long does gloss lacquer take to harden". Perhaps it's different for government contractors, though? :)

OpenAI pulls plug on ChatGPT smarmbot that praised user for ditching psychiatric meds

"Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With"?

Will the employees of the Sirius Cybernetics CorporationOpenAI be first against the wall when the revolution comes? That they are "a bunch of mindless jerks" is, I respectfully submit, beyond debate.

It's scarcely more context-aware than Eliza. Honestly, would

And how does "I am going to stop my medication" make you feel?

> _

...be a noticeably less appropriate response, whilst saving $gajillions in GPU/energy costs?

Actually, the one thing I was going to comment on, before realizing that it's bad taste and makes me a terrible human being, was the sentence in the article ...the user posted "it helped me so much, i finally realized that schizophrenia is just another label..."

"The users, surely?" I thought, before regretting my sense of humour.

Alt-browser Flow breezes through web tests, but still far from a daily driver

Re: Is it embeddable?

Intriguing, thanks for mentioning Servo; I hadn't heard of it.

Like OP, I have been searching for a decent embeddable browser engine for C# projects. Firefox works well but is tricky to set up; webview2 is, well, Edge, and I hate myself for using it; and the less said about the time I used IE in a winforms project, the better.

Documentation on how to use Servo from within managed C# code is scarce; my google-fu is clearly not good enough to track it down, and Google's endearing habit of randomly dropping search terms ("Results missing 'C#'. Click here to include the $#%@! search term that you expressly specified as a search term") hasn't improved my current mood.

Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction

Re: Starting points

Strange women lying in ponds building Linux distributions is no basis for an operating system. Supreme market share derives from a mandate from the users, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

Let me guess, even that short message took you an hour to type because the membrane keyboard wouldn't register your keypresses consistently? :)

Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline

> I expect there are 10 years worth of unanswered emails and memos advising management of the fact.

AKA Mr Pony and his pink flimsies.

New Intel boss is all about ‘deleveraging’ the x86 giant

Re: Lip-Bu Tan is swinging the ax again

That was a fine Register comment.

Re: De-laborating.

No, you're thinking of "spawn camping".

Microsoft mystery folder fix might need a fix of its own

I think it's El Reg's sarcastic attempt at a clickbait headline.

Still, could be worse.

"You Won't Believe What This Redmond Company Just Did"

"What Internet Users In $your_ip_geolocation Are All Obsessed With"

"Top 10 Windows Annoyances. Number 4 Will Shock You!"

Re: Quality control - yes we’ve heard of it

All good points.

>But in business, particularly small businesses, where a security breach could mean bankruptcy,...

More than that; someone correct me if I'm wrong, but don't a lot of cyber (ugh, I hate that word) insurance policies mandate that the business keeps up-to-date on software patches and doesn't run unsupported software? A bit like car insurance policies being cancelled if the car's been modified.