Posts by Andrew Scott

Windows 11 poised to beat 10, mostly because it has to

Re: How long...

Think you're lucky, left my computer running but wasn't logged in during the week. when i had time to login and a reason to use it the os had been updated to win 11 without asking for permission.

System builders say server prices set to spike as Trump plays customs cowboy

Re: In other news

and the sea wine dark.

For flux sake: CISA, annexable allies warn of hot DNS threat

Re: Developing fast flux detection algorithms

might help to require a longer ttls for dns records. why not 10 minutes minimum, possibly 30? make it easier to weed out all those sub 3 minute domains.

EU: These are scary times – let's backdoor encryption!

Re: Puzzled.........

please, record and google translate. language is a code, not a cypher. supposed to be easily understood.

Re: Next on the agenda ...

indiana had a bill ready to define pi in something like 1897. Fortunately it didn't pass. think it was based on the squaring of the area of a circle. probably more accurate than 3 but who knows.

starts to get old when you need to decrypt a few hundred accounts.

WHY can't Silicon Valley create breakable non-breakable encryption, cry US politicians

Re: Rubbish

You can always use something other than aes if you don't trust it. think the mistake is to use the term "keys". when politicians hear "key" they think of the locks on their offices and they have a master "key" that can unlock all the doors. they "reason" that if a master key can be made for their offices you must be able to make a master "key" for any encryption algorithm. They can also point to all the tv shows and movies where encryption algorithms are broken all the time. There are unbreakable algorithms out there they just aren't practical for typical use.

Windows intros 365 Link, a black box that does nothing but connect to Microsoft's cloud

really thin clients

i remember "thin" clients designed to boot to a server and run dos. dos commands on the server together with dos applications. client was just a keyboard, a monitor, a network card, and some memory. used rpl.

Bill Gates unearths Microsoft's ancient code like a proud nerd dad

Re: The Moral of the Story.. but almost all real world BASIC's were interpreters

yes, started with turbo c. inexpensive and easily found in local stores. nice ide as i remember.

Re: The Moral of the Story

only "ported" if they had a copy of the source code, and really only if the source was in 8080 asm.

OpenAI wants to bend copyright rules. Study suggests it isn’t waiting for permission

Re: "rigid copyright rules are repressing innovation and investment"

So i bought a book to learn a subject with. i gave the book to a friend so he could learn the same thing. that book has been read by dozens of people by now. is the writer or the company that published that book entitled to dozens of separate fees from each of the people who read that book? Humans generally learn by reading books. Obviously for the best profit, publishing houses should stop printing paper copies and only license copies on line. use biometrics to make sure that you can't share a book even if you share a smartphone or computer. Perhaps llms should be trained with ocr from physical copies. Then if you need to update the model you can just have the system re-read the physical book. Should probably collect as many physical books as possible before publishing houses realize to improve profits they need to burn the libraries and privately held copies of all these extant copies that no longer provide a profit. Once the physical copies are all gone, copyrights won't matter. The book will be electronic and tied to a single readers biometrics. No longer readable after that person dies. The post office will be able to do away with book rates.

Forget Signal. National Security Adviser Waltz now accused of using Gmail for work

Re: Proud to be dumb in government

sounds like a good idea. Unfortunately we'd still need to refill those positions from the limited group of nitwits that support this idiocy.

it wasn't her server that was hacked back then. i'd say she made a good choice.

Signalgate storm intensifies as journalist releases full secret Houthi airstrike chat

Re: They're already

Wouldn't the name of a cia operative be considered classified? Quite a bit of harm when plame's name was released. if the signalgate affair is so innocent i would think the orange peanut would release an unredacted version with the name of the alleged cia agent. After all there's nothing to see here.

Re: They're already

Think he already did that when he moved the embassy.

Re: They're already

in the us three rights make a left.

Re: They're already

it wasn't a "leak" it was an invitation. even as a "leak" that cnn thing is hardly equivalent. typical of cowards.

Re: Does not compute ....

seen robots walk. even a planaria can crawl. wouldn't credit either with a brain or the capability to think.

North Korea’s fake tech workers now targeting European employers

Re: Simples

and bring a "Real ID". won't even be able to drive out of state i'm told if you don't have a real id. Thinking of staying at home from now on and doing all my shopping on-line. Don't want to get shipped off to Columbia by ice.

Wikipedia's overlords bemoan AI bot bandwidth burden

Re: The Register has asked the Wikimedia Foundation...

why not just redirect anything you've identified as an llm scraper to china or x and let them deal with the problem? know it won't put them off forever, but might produce interesting results in the llms.

Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition

Re: Win 10 is not bad.

NT 4? limited to 1024 tracks with the default setup. couldn't use larger disks properly.

Re: Something about an exception, and proving a rule...

liked borland c at the time. believe it was a lot less expensive than ms version. nice ide.

Re: Nothing Comparable to AD, You Say?

that was an answer to Banyan Vines and their earlier directory service. university was managed on that for quite a while.

Re: never being a good operating system of theirs

AD is crap.

Microsoft is redesigning the Windows BSoD to get you back to work ‘as fast as possible’

Re: Hey Microsoft

Get a lot of those on laptops. those are mostly intel aren't they?

To avoid disaster-recovery disasters, learn from Reg readers' experiences

Re: Handwaving

if you can afford it. not always easy to convince the distributors of the coin that there is a good reason for having backup until the day they lose something and there aren't any working backups.

Re: The first thing I panic about...

know that feeling. back in the '90s had the server in my office. office had to be moved in one day which meant taking the server down, taking it apart, moving it to the new office and putting it all back together. did a backup to dat. moved everything, and it wouldn't start back up. volume drive was off line. found a spare and recovered from tape. at 1 am a dean walks in to do some work. explained that the system was being restored and i didn't know if her data was recovered. finished at 4 am, went home and was back at 8 am. molex power connector on the disk had a bad solder joint. repaired it a few days later. Scary. always a bit of dred when restarting a server, updating it, restoring files. aren't paid enough when your working life and vacation life are spent waiting for the call that the server lost someone data and it's your fault.

Re: Backups...

Knew someone who paid for a cloud backup service. one day when needing to restore data she discovered the data stored in the cloud for her account was not available. Service claimed they didn't know what happened to her data. not sure I'd trust cloud backup. It's also not available when your network connection is unavailable like the time that wind storm brought the neighbors tree down on your cable network connection and they take 2 weeks to repair it while claiming that it's been repaired every time you call them. Yep, love the service i get from comcast.

Genetic data repo OpenSNP to self-destruct before authoritarians weaponize it

do you think most of the go into politics?

Brits to build ExoMars landing gear after Russia sent packing

Perhaps they're tired of russian operatives coming into their countries and committing murder in their streets and leaving nerve agents lying around waiting to be picked up by children. Invading a country without provocation on the border of Europe might also be a reason. Good reason for Poland, Sweden, Finland and others to want the possible protection of NATO. Russia has enjoyed nibbling away as Finland's territory for decades and is always a threat implied and explicit.

From concept to cosmos: Webb engineers on the telescope that changed everything

Re: If we didn't learn how to make thinner and ligher mirrors...

thought the mirrored coating was gold not aluminum. better reflector at the wavelengths they were interested in, i.e. infrared. could be wrong though.

AI datacenters want to go nuclear. Too bad they needed it yesterday

Re: "an atomic plant typically takes at least five years to construct"

seen any yet? maybe they will become a thing, but they're not putting one in mby.

Nvidia's latest AI PC boxes sound great – if you're a data scientist with $3,000 to spare

Re: AI PC's were a Gimmick

Spent $4847 for 2 Gigs of ram, the most the server would take. Creation date on the spread sheet to price memory options is 2001.

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

go back to the '60s and earlier almost everyone who visited a dentist had swallowed at least some mercury. Fillings were an amalgam of silver and mercury.

Privacy died last century, the only way to go is off-grid

Re: what the experts are saying

sure running into a cave will save you. saw a recent YouTube video about someone exploring an abandoned gold mine in Arizona as i remember. got quite a way down the mine and started hearing something else in there. put up a trail camera outside the mine and found a large mountain lion had been using the mine as a home. they're finding those lions further and further east, used to be the biggest thing to worry about was a pissed off raccoon, now it's black bears with young a few hundred yards away. the closest confirmed pumas were on the other side of the river, but that's not comforting.

Tech support session saved files, but probably ended a marriage

had similar problems here. there were some odd problems with the software, it wouldn't recognize flash drive when they were inserted. there was a registry entry that had an incorrect path name that was being expanded to point to the wrong place. fixed that and most of the problems went away. camera was interesting, could be rotated for selfies of pictures, basically point toward the keyboard user or rotate to point the other way. was interesting. the first laptops i'd seen with cameras.

Now Windows Longhorn is long gone, witness reflects on Microsoft's OS belly-flop

Re: Deliver something worthwhile?

Well here you needed to run a vpn to call back to campus to verify the copy was legal. People would be on sabbatical and their os ran in limp mode and called them a theif until they either came back on campus or managed to get the vpn running. Not running the vpn also meant you didn't get updates which could also cause problem. recommended users have the vpn running by default, but they usually forgot.

Microsoft patches patch that broke USB printing in Windows 11

Re: In Microsoft's defense...

had a pagewide pro x576dw. printed 40+ pages per minute. when i left had done over 170,000 page in 5 years. went through 2 years of covid without being used and printed perfectly when we returned to the office. cost about 5 cents a page for color. most inkjet printers will stop working if they aren't used for 2 years. great printer but they stopped making them.

there is the "A patchy server" which is patches to the ncsa httpd server. patches on patches. been running a long time now.

50 years ago the last Saturn rocket rolled out of NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building

Re: So, what's developed in the last 50 years?

isn't a rotary detonation engine a controlled explosion? not a working model yet, but supposed to be more efficient.

Aardvark beats groundhogs and supercomputers in weather forecasting

Re: I use the Golden Gate Bridge.

if you're suddenly under water in a slot canyon in arizona it probably rained north of you a few hours ago. Local weather was fine,

ReactOS emits release 0.4.15 – its first since 2021

Re: Server 2003 Enterprise: only 32 bit windows

Are you sure? most of the windows machines split vm between user and system programs. 2 gig for the system and 2 gig for the kernel. you could change the split to get something like 1 gig for the kernel and 3 for user apps i think. had to change either a registry entry or a config entry. we never had any machines with more than 1 gig of ram. it was expensive back then. most of the new computers came with 256 meg. even 32 bit linux had a similar split, but it was more flexible. linux could also actually use pae and more memory in 32 bit mode. think somone with a vaguely italian name developed that, but you couldn't actually use more than 32 Tb as the page tables had to be in the first 4 Gb or ram and you'd run out of space if you had 64 Tb ram. This is what i seem to remember though i could be very wrong. Do remember that when i finally got 3 Gig of ram in an xp machine it made a huge difference. with a lot of netscape windows open it could take ages to page them back when i closed the current window and and older one had to be redrawn. Think the same guy who got pae working also came up with separate vm for kernel and user memory so you could have 4 gig for the kernel and 4 gig for the user apps. Slowed things down a little as moving between kernel space and user space meant change the tables and flushing the tlb, but was usable. Think i also remember that it took a long time to test the pae on a machine with 64 Tb ram as no one had one.

Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users – including its own employees

Re: So...

no that was "TG". You must know the difference. mendacious the lot of them.

Re: What about Outlook (less shitty)?

Used that in my office for years. rest of the campus was using banyan email in a dos box in windows but we had a decent windows email system. liked the rules system, much better than the current version of rules in outlook.

Revenge of the nerds: Teachers, professors sue to undo Trump science funding cuts

Re: The gavel is mightier than a chainsaw?

no, they just need to find some good ones, though some of them may be finding themselves in no win situations. Unlike the rest of the trump administration who can lie like rugs, the lawyers are constrained in court with what they can say if they want to keep practicing law.

research

For his own good he should really reinstate funding for Alzheimer's research, though it may be too late.

OTF, which backs Tor, Let's Encrypt and more, sues to save its funding from Trump cuts

Well, musk doesn't care. figures he'll always have enough to buy what he needs. the hoi polli needs weeding anyways.

Top Trump officials text secret Yemen airstrike plans to journo in Signal SNAFU

Atlantic going out of business

Wonder if any of the businesses he's always claiming are going out of have ever? Certainly a lot of his business have gone out of, you'd think he'd be an expert on that subject by now. Maybe he'd score better on that if he mentioned tesla.

Google admits it deleted some customer data after 'technical issue'

Re: Google admits it deleted some customer data after 'technical issue'

it's only a backup if there are two copies. If the backup copy is deleted you should have the original. if the original is lost, you should have the backup. if you only have one copy the off site those are an archive. lose that and it's probably gone forever. Always have at least two copies of data you don't want to lose. That's one of the problems with "onedrive". by default all your data is moved to the cloud. if something goes wrong with that it's gone. hopefully ms has a "backup" for their alleged backup system.

As nation-state hacking becomes 'more in your face,' are supply chains secure?

Re: Let's bomb the Houthis?

yes even a secure app like signal is not help if you're brain dead.