Posts by David 132

IBM Cloud evaporates as datacenter loses power

Re: Yo, you're cloud is on fire!

Let's hope the Rolling Stones have a mobile data centre nearby.

Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer

Where in their motto did it ever say, "Don't Download Evil", hmm?

Re: Just

Lynx is for weenies who can't handle just telnetting to port 80.

(Note icon. And spare me your quibbling about https, please.)

Re: Especially fun for terminalservers...

Would a server-side filesystem with deduplication not take care of that? It's the same .bin file in every case, right?

(No, I'm not excusing Google's behavior.)

And now you've subliminally motivated me to cue up an early 90s choonz playlist on my Musicbee while I work. Things like

The Prodigy - Out of Space; The Shamen - Ebeneezer Goode / LSI / Boss Drum; Urban Cookie Collective - The Key The Secret; Urban Hype - A Trip To Trumpton; KLF - Justified and Ancient; Stereo MC's - Connected; Happy Mondays - Step On

Ah, happier times. In the immortal words of Jarvis Cocker,

"and you want to call your mother and say / Mother, I can never come home again / cos I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere / somewhere in a field in Hampshire."

(Edit: perhaps, as part of their technical overhaul, the Reg team will fix the bug that inserts all the extra linebreaks in comments? I had to put the tracklist onto one line, because otherwise it

looked

like

this)

Re: Hoist by their own petard

Business 301 (advanced, PhD-level) - if you can't create the need by healthier means, lobby Government to get legislation passed that mandates your need as an obligation.

Firefox integrates an ad-blocker, but not to block ads

Re: Pot calling kettle black

Firefox with UBO and NoScript and sundry other privacy-focussed plugins here, and I see the "bubble" icon just fine. It's also visible at the bottom of each article, next to the relevant tags (e.g. [IBM] [OFF-PREM] ❑). Perhaps the Reg web team's tweaked the code since your comment?

"The overal consensus is, the new format sucks donkey balls, none of your viewers, ie customers, like it and we all want you to change it back to the old format and fonts. And, slap whoever came up with this with a monkfish, left out in the sun a couple of weeks."

"...but apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?"

Re: What are the extra advertisements it finds?

As I understand it, PiHole is purely a DNS white/blacklist filter. So it'll remove ad content that's pulled from a separate domain, purely by 404'ing (or 523'ing?) any requests to ads.sitename.com, but it can't remove content that appears (by DNS trickery or whatever other dark arts) to come from the first-party site.

Re: Design?

"compound that stupidity with leaving them where they used to be on the comments pages"

That just suggests that they haven't got around to applying the new styling to the comments pages yet. Brace for impact!

Re: Design?

Amen.

You'd think the Reg team, being aware that their readership are technical, crotchety, and strongly opinionated (and I don't mean those pejoratively) would at least have piloted the new layout for a period first ("new.theregister.com" / "old.theregister.com" à la Reddit, for example).

Don't know how much is down to my innate neophobia, but my initial reaction to the new layout is that I hate it. Too many images, seemingly random article placement (a few minutes ago I clicked on an interesting-looking story that was prominent on the front page, only to notice that it actually dates from 3 months ago) and the font-choice is jarring.

Grumble, grumble.

$250M crypto-robbing gang’s dirty work guy sentenced to 6.5 years behind bars

Re: They never learn..

Or start a religion.

The network password was a key plot point in one of the most famous movies of all time

Re: whatever you do

Back in the day when one of the default Windows wallpapers was named Bliss.jpg or something, I needed a copy of it from a Linux machine and searched for (IIRC) "Bliss wallpaper", but making the mistake of having Safe Search turned off.

My word.

So very many young ladies enjoying themselves en plein air.*

(*I emphasize that this was many years ago back when the Web was wild and untamed, not the morally-pure sanitised corporate sandbox it is now, so don't bother searching. I'm sure such naughty images are no longer to be found... :/ )

Re: World Password Day

That's OK, with the Reg's new layout and its propensity to surface (ugh, sorry) really, really old articles on the front page, I just assumed that you were correct and I was reading a story from last month. Then I saw that your comment was only a few hours old and got really confused as to what date it is.

I knew I should have put more potato-peelings into the Mr Fusion :)

IBM tried to kill Tab navigation. Microsoft told it Bill Gates' mother wasn't interested

Re: PTSD

*Hotei's Battle Without Honor or Humanity intensifies*

Re: PTSD

I once sat through an hour-long meeting to discuss a Powerpoint presentation that a senior exec was going to give at an industry conference, containing technical data sourced from my group. 58 of those minutes were spent listening to the verbal masturbation of his TA deliberating whether or not to move a text-box 10 pixels to the left and enlarge its font size by 2 points.

It made the Schleswig-Holstein Question or Jarndyce v. Jarndyce look like "what colour socks shall I wear today".

And in the final insult to Dr Hook, even Bill Gates has made it onto the cover of "Rolling Stone".

CYA run rampant. Companies prattle about "empowering employees to take risks" but when something goes wrong, do the senior management say "well, it was a calculated risk, but it didn't pan out"? Do they say "we empowered this employee to make the call, so it's our responsibility that it went wrong"? Or do they say, "this employee made the decision without appropriate risk analysis, it's all his fault"?

Clue: it's rarely (a) or (b).

And so in too many large enterprises, you get North Korean levels of risk aversion and upwards-buck-passing.

Mars rover hits rocky snag with power tool

Re: No One Would Have Believed That In....

I hope NASA remembered the "more than two shakes means you're playing with it" mantra.

Anyway, more seriously, a bit of Polyfilla/Spackle in the hole and it'll be good as new.

Brit mathematician lets AI agent loose with credit card – cue password leaks, CAPTCHA chaos and more

Re: Wrong woman

Pandora's Jar-Jar... meesa worried!

Qué?

Attackers are cashing in on fresh 'CopyFail' Linux flaw

Re: The timeline on this one was a bit ungentlemanly imo

These days, a lot of security researchers seem to be more focused on giving their newly-discovered vulnerability a cool name and logo; who has time for responsible disclosure?

Hobbyist xenomorphs Raspberry Pi into Alien-themed DIY laptop

Re: Ah, progress

I can't decide whether you haven't noticed that the Pi Zero 2W has 512MB not KB, or you think there is some humorous significance to adding 128 kilobytes to 512 megabytes. "512-and-one-eighth megabytes should be enough for anyone"?

Re: Done Before ... -ish

Anyone who's ever done PC repair for a heavy smoker can empathise, not to mention shudder with vicarious disgust.

Icon? What else -->

Re: Ah, progress

Did you perhaps mean 128MB, if you're riffing on that old 640 joke?

Or have I just been, as da kids say, whooshed?

(Addendum to my earlier comment above - full disclosure, "1979 me" would have actually said something like "brbrbrbrbrbbbrbrb wanna wanna teddy wanna teddy NOW", as I was still in nappies. I was precocious, yes, but not that precocious.)

Ah, progress

FTA: "...and a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W - a low-power board with 512 MB of RAM - meaning it can't do too much..."

2026 me to 1979 me: "We have a self-contained computer with 4x 1GHz cores, 512MB RAM, a touch-capable 1280x400 full colour LCD screen, and wireless networking in the megabits-per-second speed range. Oh, and the motherboard costs the equivalent to you of £2.40. But we won't be able to 'do too much with it'."

1979 me: "Errr...."

Real estate giant confirms vishing incident as ShinyHunters and Qilin both come knocking

"People looking for a quick profit from the elderly care sector want the facilities to be built quickly and cheaply so that they can be stuffed with wrinkly cash-cows and the returns can start flowing"

"Uhhh... boss, that's commendably forthright and accurate, but may I suggest that we run it through Claude to be re-written into a more, um, fluffy form?"

Classic ASCII game NetHack debuts version 5.0 just 11 years after last major release

Re: Time is the problem

I'm ashamed - no, dammit, proud - that my first action on reading the news of this 5.0 release was to download the Amiga binary, and run it on my old A4000/040 desktop (albeit under WinUAE emulation, the original hardware being somewhere deep, deep in my garage). Yes, I could have just downloaded the native Windows binary but where's the fun in that?

It works perfectly and is just as addictive as I remember.

Hands off my trademark! Notepad++ dev threatens legal action against macOS port

I must admit that when I read the initial coverage last week, I incorrectly (but naturally) assumed that this was an official port from the Notepad++ creator.

Microsoft's turned Windows into a cesspool, but it wants to do better

Re: What's wrong at Redmond?

Don't forget "Consignia".

And "Abrdn" (th invstmnt cmpny tht cnt ffrd vwls).

Thirded.

In terms of communicating information, it's about as efficient as searching the web for "how to do X" and being offered those youtube videos that take 10 minutes HEY GUYS REMEMBER TO LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE to communicate a perfectly simple FIRST A WORD FROM OUR SPONSORS! point that could be explained in 5 lines of text & a diagram.

Bah, ignore me, I am just grumpy today.

Microsoft releases first big update after Nadella's vow to 'win back fans'

Re: Explorer bug fixes

Or the longstanding bug whereby if it can't resolve a shared network drive or location, Windows Explorer hangs for ~30s when opening the "My Computer" window or a file dialog.

> As distributed it doesn't need to contain ANY AI at all. just a link to a download of the appropriate bits, for both of the people who want it.

But surely both Pavan Davuluri and Satya Nadella already have it?

Pro-Iran crew turns DDoS into shakedown as Ubuntu.com stays down

Re: disturbing timing

It's clearly a distraction attack to allow them, or an allied crew, to do something nefarious in the Ubuntu repos while everyone's panicking about Copy Fail.

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: Analogue clocks

I've always felt that a promising TV detective plot device would involve a German witness to a British crime, and hinge on the disparity between how times involving half-hours are expressed in those two languages; "half 8 / halb acht" is interpreted by the former as being 0730, and the latter as 0830...

Re: musical notation was probably one of the oldest programming languages .....

One might even say a C# comment.

UK pensions dept goes shopping for spy-van tech with £2M surveillance tender

Re: warrant?

Another lovely thing we can thank Blair for.

Firefox maker torches Google for building Prompt API into browser

Re: Oh well . . .

Ugh. Your dry humour did indeed fly right over my head. My bad. With some chagrin, I've converted my spittle-flecked irate downvote to a fluffy & supportive upvote accordingly!

Re: Just say no?

The Prompt API, as Google describes it, "gives web pages the ability to directly prompt a browser-provided language model."

"What fresh hell is this?" - Dorothy Parker. Wit, author, and AI cynic avant-la-lettre.

Do not want.

Microsoft boss tells investors the company is working to 'win back fans'

Re: Fans! Fans! Fans!

That's a lucha libre match I'd also pay good money to see. El Musko versus The Masked ChairMaster.

With an eye to eventually upgrading my workhorse PC, which is still on Windows 10, I put Server 2025 with the Desktop Experience on a sacrificial Skylake box last week. Honestly, I'm pretty impressed. A slick user interface, none of the Windows 11 crud, and even on that 10-year old PC, it runs beautifully. I may have a viable upgrade path now that doesn't involve Linux and Wine.

Unfortunate wording, or not...

FTFA, emphasis mine: There are more than 1.6 billion monthly active Windows devices, but some of the users are revolting.

Bit harsh, that. We can't all shower daily and trim our fingernails, you know, what with having to spend so much time dealing with endless forced updates & their aftermath...

Zed team releases version 1.0 of Rust-built editor: Traditional editor and AI tool

It's been many years since I read Asimov's Foundation cycle, but I recall that the cultural decline of the former galactic empire was represented in one case by a noted aristocratic "archaeologist", whose approach to researching ancient civilisations was to sit comfortably and read all the literature on the subject that had been written by others. With his vastly superior intellect (!) he would read, analyse, consider, sift, weigh the competing arguments as presented in the literature - and from there, come to his conclusions.

The idea of actually getting his hands dirty by excavating the remnants of those civilisations was, to him (and I apologise for my truly awful pun here) infra dig.

And that's how this Yegge chap comes across with his lofty "code is a liquid, you spray it through hoses, you don't look at it" pronouncement.

Microsoft opens door to the past by releasing 86-DOS and PC-DOS 1.00

Re: Antiques code show

the church in our village is dated 1262

So, a Brutalist symphony in brushed concrete and steel, then?

Re: Antiques code show

The definition of "antique" may not be the same between the countries, though.

In a former life, our office building here in the US was undergoing renovation. The Facilities team apologized profusely to us for the delays, offering the excuse that the work was taking unexpectedly long because... "it's a very old building".

It was built in 1988 - and the renovations were taking place in 2016.

I pointed out to them that my previous home back in the UK had been built circa 1880, and was still considered by the rest of the village to be one of the "new builds" :)

A pint in tribute to transatlantic understanding --->

GoDaddy customer claims registrar transferred 27-year-old domain without any security checks

Re: Schitzo

And yet sales@ email addresses, and the phone switchboard "press 1 for Sales" extensions are always monitored and answered quickly.

Funny, that.

Re: Schitzo

For me, one of the most damning parts of the article is this:

And when they tried to report the issues to GoDaddy's security team via email, the email bounced.

That, right there, is unforgivable. "Contact us at:" addresses that aren't monitored, or are invalid, should be a huge red flag that screams "this company does not give a f*ck about customer support".

Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto says GitHub ‘no longer a place for serious work’

Re: Best case side effect

Like the story of the farmer's girlfriend who ran off with his tractor, leaving him a "John Deere" letter...

Re: The place that has made me the most happy

You should have said sure, I'll come replace your printer toner, as long as you pay my travel costs - which, by the way, will include short-notice helicopter transfers to & from the cruise ship, and a private jet to get me the rest of the way as scheduled flights would take too long.

Worst case? The clueless caller realises their stupidity and beats a retreat.

Best case? A helicopter comes clattering down for a landing on the ship's deck, and you stride out to it past the gaping mouths of awe-struck fellow passengers. "My skills are needed urgently," you declare dramatically, "somewhere, there is a printer that needs new toner"...

Re: Redmond-centric

> They are, and stop calling me Shirley!

Look, he's just trying to be Frank with you.