Posts by An_Old_Dog

Red Hat offers RHEL support ‘forever’ for those who need to lock in to legacy tech

3rd Party Vendors / Stuck in the Middle

Sometimes a vendor is stuck in the middle

Everyone in a small reseller/support company I'd worked for was uncomfortable and unhappy when the application software company whose product we sold and supported EOL'd version 7 and presented migration to version 8 as the *only* option.

V7 ran on DOS, and SCO Xenix and SCO Unix, on terminals or terminal emulators. V8 was Microsoft Windows-only, and we had no rights or access to the source.

We had a lot of unhappy and angry customers.

Wang Systems

@ Simon Sharwood

I once saw a multiuser Wang system in the process of being removed. Looking at a Wang terminal-ish-looking device sitting on the floor, I saw one of the attached cables was coaxial. I speculated that it was for video SIGNAL, and that the video memory lived in the central CPU box.

Jacquard Systems (AMD 2900-series bit-slice chips, implementing a 16-bit CPU [with no memory protection on a multiuser system {FACEPALM!}]) definitely used that technique.

Re: Hardware support is the weakest link

Depending on your use case, you use emulation or virtual machines.

The quality and usefulness of those emulations and VMs will vary. It would be interesting to see if/how such emulators could/would map DH-11s, DL-11s, and/or DZ-11s to say, the serial ports hanging of a CompuTone board if you're trying to use them for process control.

I found that VMware player version six-ish locked up when I tried to use the mapped virtual parallel port in IEEE-1284 mode.

Broken Reg Website

I posted two comments under this subject last night, got the "In 10 minutes..." message that they were being processed, and hours later ... they have not appeared.

There was nothing obscene or controversial in the comments, so it is highly unlikely they are pending human review/approval.

1. Fix the broken office-politics which prevents The Register's management from acknowledging, accepting, and fixing the problem of The Register's broken website. There have been multiple reports of broken functionality which go beyond the we-don't-like-the-new-layout sort.

2. Fix your broken website.

I will waste no further time entering comments into a system which routes some of them to /dev/null.

Avoid AI atrophy – new tool promises to reverse vibe coding skills decay

Sometimes, You Need an Artisan

... as a system designer, as coders, or both.

A problem is most managers don't know how to make that decision -- hiring/contracting artisans, vs mass-producers -- correctly. I'm not confident that I could make that decision correctly in a majority of instances. But I do understand the concept of technical debt.

I've also encountered the results of various computer artisans who left behind uncommented, undocumented, unmaintainable piles of code. In one instance the code worked (as best we could tell) correctly. In another instance, the code was as buggy as a chunk of the Florida Everglades.

I Never Memorised it All

I've coded assembler programs for the PDP-8, the Motorola 6800, the Intel 8080, the Intel 8085, the Zilog Z-80, the MOSTEK 6502 and 6510, the HP-85, Gear's virtual machine, and the CDC 6600.

In no case did I completely memorise all the instructions.

I sort-of memorised most of the instructions. After writing out my high-level pseudo-code, I would translate it to the appropriate assembly code, with manual in hand, frequently saying to myself, "I think there's an instruction which does what I want in here," and flipping through the manual until I found it.

That was back when the assembly language manual for a CPU was less than 100 pages and fit easily into one hand.

Modern, bloated CPU instruction sets and hateful, write-only registers are no fun for me.

I suspect I'd fail any assembly-language memorisation-based "test" badly.

AI tool scours the web for job openings, preps your resume and cover letter

Dick-Detector Feature Required

This system needs an additional feature: a dick-detector.

Remember that job -- or jobs, plural -- which you left to get out from under the soul-burning exposure to an absolute dick who was your boss, an executive further-up your command chain, a cow-worker, supplier to, or client of your company?

You don't want to take a new job and be cursed with their re-appearance in your life!

So, the dick-detector feature would read a simple ASCII-file dick-list, which you would create, would scan LinkedIn, Monster, etc. for these individuals, and for each dick, create a chronologically-sorted list of companies they have worked for.

If the most-recent company any dick in your dick-list has worked for matches a company name offering a potential good job-match for you, it would warn you of that, and NOT send any automated responses to that company until you manually released the hold.

After you made an in-depth, personal investigation to check whether the listed dick(s) work(s) for the company the system is suggesting you apply to, you either release the hold, or delete that company from the AI jobsearch/response program's current potential-employer list.

Companies do change their names, are bought out, etc., so the dick detector code would have to deal with that.

Icon for -- maybe? -- a joke.

OpenAI's Atlas browser doesn't make it to its first birthday

Would You Buy a Used Car from this Company?

I wondered how large the download of their accreted-mass Frankensteinian tar-baby was.

I couldn't find out (I have no OpenAI subscription).

They had a slick-as-snot website which failed on a link to invoke a video. I'm running Firefox on Android.

Testing is not their thing.

EU 'Chat Control' snoopfest returns after vote to kill it falls short

Papers, Please

Officer Friendly will not ask you for your papers.

Officer Friendly will already have had them auto-transmitted from your legally-mandated, you-must-keep-it-within-three-feet-of-your-body communication device.

New tool gives CLIs a warm and GUI feeling instead

Re: Might be useful to avoid nuclear bombs going off

After some digging ... the correct designator in SCO Xenix and Unix, for a 1.44 MB diskette drive, configured as the first diskette drive, is coded as /dev/[r]fd0135ds18

... in case it ever comes up.

Re: Might be useful to avoid nuclear bombs going off

I've got this. I used to use tar every day.

# tar xvf /dev/fd135ds... Uh, how did SCO designate the first high-density, double-sided floppy drive ...?

Shit.

Microsoft Global Device Identifier fingers Scattered Spider suspect

Re: OTOH: quote: Microsoft is really trying to make people stop using Windows uh?

... and if he's just adding some lines at the end of the file, using echo with the append redirector (">>") works fine, and with no need to invoke a resource-hogging editor. (LOL)

Re: OTOH: quote: Microsoft is really trying to make people stop using Windows uh?

You left out the steps one must take inside the editor.

"Lawful" Demand

From TFA: And when presented with a lawful demand for information, most service providers will cooperate and provide whatever information they store.

Of course they will. What is concerning is what those service providers do when they receive an un-lawful demand, or request.

*Ring* ... *ring* ... *ring* ... "Hello?"

"Hey, Charlie, it's your old pal Jack. How ya doin'?"

"Not bad, not bad, can't complain."

"The reason I called was I was wondering if you could shoot me anything you have for the last 24 hours with Microsoft GUID 4a7e3371-9816-47e1-9fbd-076e83e92e53 in it."

"Jaaaaack ... are you stalking your ex-wife again?"

"What? No! This is about a bad guy, really. Nothing to do with my ex-wife -- the venomous, blood-sucking, two-timing bitch. She deserves to burn in Hell! God, I hate my meds. They make my head feel funny.

Anyway... about that data..."

"I dunno, Jack ... you seem pretty wound-up."

"I'm fine, Charlie. Really, I'm fine. Also ... I have a pair of tickets to the Senators' next home game. Front-row seats ..."

"Arggh -- Jack, you old pirate ... Fine! Done! I'll shoot you an email with the info."

"Thanks, Charlie. It's gonna be a great game."

Police intercept tipsy teens after Waymo snitches for shooting Orbeez out of the car

Da-Glo Squirt Guns, 3D Printers, and Cap Guns

Yeah, okay, I totally forgot about 3D printers. For better or worse, we're not living in the 1960s any more.

Back then, Mattel made a series of fake-spy toys; at least two of them were objects which transformed into toy guns. The fake InstaMatic camera transformed into a toy pistol, and the fake (largish) transistor radio transformed into a toy rifle.

They probably don't make "cap guns" any more, either. The original "caps" were rolls of perforated paper with dots of mild explosives laminated in. You'd load the cap gun with a roll of caps, pull the trigger, the mechanism would feed up the roll by one position, the hammer would fall, hit the "dot", and you'd get a loud "bang" (it didn't shoot anything). Repeat as desired, until the roll was used up.

Sometimes, we'd place a roll of caps on a cement sidewalk, and use a rock to hit the dots of explosive. This is where the ORIGINAL meaning of the phrase, "bustin' caps" came from. (I never knew WHY these rolls were called "caps".)

A disimproved-improved version was a proprietary toy revolver, which used disposable soft plastic rings. These rings had little cups, which held a mixture containing a tiny bit of PETN. The gun's hammer had a pin which struck into the cup, setting it off.

A friend had one of these, and I fired it just once, because it was so loud it made my ears ring.

Untrained (Police) Eyes

Are the police so-poorly trained that they cannot distinguish a plastic toy squirt- or gel-bead-gun from a real gun?!

They had the video feed from Waymo, so presumably they got a "good look".

Yet, they rolled upon the cab with drawn guns.

When I was a child, I had a squirt gun which appeared to be a perfect replica of the German P-08.

Nobody with any common sense would fear it, as it was made of Da-Glo orange plastic.

OpenAI job listing suggests ChatGPT could someday replace junior analysts at Goldman Sachs

Re: I love this for them

and most of the junior staff got laid off

For all the harm they've done the world, I'd like to see all the SENIOR bankers and banking executives fired from their jobs, without any golden parachutes.

Or better, fired with a literal golden parachute -- from 20,000 feet above ground level.

Fake IT bods on Microsoft Teams coax workers into installing malware

Compromise Success Factors

"We've seen in the logs of the User's session the Title 'System Administrator (External unfamiliar) | Microsoft Teams'; the External unfamiliar tag indicates a contact from outside the organization with no trusted relationship"

One reason this approach is as effective for the scammers as it is, is due to outsourced help desks.

DRAM prices are killing the cheap smartphone

SPOF

The non-user-swappable battery.

A techie can do the surgery themselves.

Josephine and Joe Q. Public will have to pay a phone repair shop a lot of money to replace the battery, or buy an expensive new phone.

GitHub AI agent leaks private repos when asked nicely

Attention, Neophiles!

Do not use agentic AI.

Do not use agentic AI to automate anything. Instead, use humanly-created automations.

If you are an office worker and you have a workflow you would like automated, but don't know how to do it yourself, call your company's business analysts. That's what they're there for.

People using agentic AI are playing the part of Mickey Mouse in "The Sorceror's Apprentice".

EU urged to act after Pegasus infects phone of spyware inquiry MEP

Re: The Word "Persistent" in the Phrase, "Persistent Malware" ...

@ Furious:

From the URL you included in your last post:

To achieve a true "clean slate" and permanently remove an advanced infection like Pegasus, security experts generally recommend more aggressive measures than a simple restart, such as wiping the device and updating the iOS to the latest version.

On the other hand, that URL links to a dynamically-generated AI "summary", so your and my results may vary with time.

The Word "Persistent" in the Phrase, "Persistent Malware" ...

... means, "it survives reboots".

Here's info on one such phone spyware package:

GhostSpy Web-based Android RAT

Have you heard of "searching the web"? You can learn things by doing that.

Microsoft says the world is changing faster than it can keep up as it guts commercial, Xbox teams

Euphemistic Code Talk

“Some of the tasks we do every day can now be automated, and that means we all need to keep learning, keep building new skills, and keep adapting as the work evolves,” Coleman added.

In other words, "We expect AI to compensate for the fired staff, but we're not directly admitting to this expectation."

Dev says Google warned him about account hijack – then charged him $11,000 anyway

Re: My recommendation for usage of Google's AI products via Google API remains:

My uni also had a CDC 3300, initially running SCOPE. SCOPE use there was eventually phased out for the more reliable and user-friendly uni-created OS, "OS-3".

The 3300 was decommissioned in the 1980s, and sadly, the tapes and card decks holding the OS-3 source and binaries are gone.

Re: My recommendation for usage of Google's AI products via Google API remains:

Ah, for the mainframe days of (in Kronos and NOS) the commands CPULIMIT and LINELIMIT. Exceeding either user-settable limit aborted the job.

JCLers: did IBM have anything like that?

Startup sues Palo Alto Networks' Koi Security, saying an AI-hallucinated report falsely linked it to Chinese espionage

Using AI to Fight Bad Use of AI

From the court filing, on the first page:

"DISCLOSURE REGARDING GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Pursuant to Southern District of California General Order 210, Counsel for Plaintiff hereby discloses that generative artificial intelligence was used in the preparation of this Pleading for legal research and initial drafting. In accordance with the Order, Counsel certifies that every legal citation, factual assertion, and argument contained herein has been independently verified for accuracy. Counsel further certifies that no confidential or non-public information was entered into any public generative AI system in the creation of this document."

The plaintiff's attorneys are using AI, and putting their neck on the block to claim they reviewed and verified ALL of their AI's output.

Interesting ...

Nvidia floats double-dipping datacenter financing scheme

Re: Grasping at straws

I strongly suspect Leather Jacket Jensen has some pivot-plays in the wings for nVIDIA, to be trotted out when the bubble bursts.

He is a pretty-smart guy.

(No, I do not belong to any cults, nor do I own nVIDIA stock.)

New humanoid robots from China look like creepy pop star action figures – complete with slightly dodgy lip-synch

Mono-Something

They're all very, very, very white. And most of them are dressed like something from the 1980s.

Oracle outlines all the ways it could lose the farm it bet on AI

Oh, Yeah ... Oracle

I've never met anyone who has said ("admitted"?) that their company uses Oracle's cloud services.

Boffins peg narcissistic leadership as the real driver behind 'return to office' demands

There is a Continuum

When I was a techie at a big company, we were in a noisy, large room, with electronics-style workbenches and stools. The project coordinators had their normal desks, in one corner. There were no internal walls.

That setup worked well for me, because I could do my work there while subconsciously listening with one ear to the chatter around me and picking up important info, which sometimes required an immediate response from me.

I imagine it was hell for the project coordinators.

When I became a system software analyst at the same company, our group had offices with two analysts in each one. With my new job duties, I wanted SILENCE, which I obtained via a pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones.

My colleagues were close enough for a quick question or micro-conference, but far-enough removed that they did not impinge on me.

I could never have been an effective SSA in the techie bullpen, even with the headphones, due to noise level and distracting motion in my peripheral vision.

One size does not fit all.

Portuguese restaurant kiosk software gives Windows indigestion

Sus Name

Enlarging the photo, it appears that the WinRestKioskWPF.exe portion of the filename is proceded by a long string of digits.

That looks pretty suspicious to me, and I'd check things out very carefully before allowing it to run, if it were my computer.

Huntress CEO says threat hunter used 'poor judgment' in alerting ransomware crim about law enforcement probe

Huntress CEO Used 'Poor Judgement' in Retaining Mole on Staff

See title.

Qualcomm's proposed solution to catch up in AI infra: Bury the compute under the DRAM

Please Delete Corporate Slang from The Register's Articles

Consider substituting "speedy", "quick" or "fast" for "performant".

"Performant" is a stupid word.

Shall we next see phrases such as, "floatant boats", "sunkant boats", "rollant wheels", or "walkant people"?

One Possibility

... is that Qualcom put high-speed compression/decompression chips at each end of the LPDDR/CPU bus.

Claude Code users complain their chat records are being mysteriously wiped out

Re: Oh no...

@IGotOut:

You may be right; it's entirely possible some vibe-coders didn't RTFM.

There's another possibility: Anthropic lied, and hurriedly revised their online documentation when the problem was complained-about. (Does anyone have a downloaded copy of their original-version documentation to check their claim against?)

Why would I think Anthropic may be lying in their response to The Register? I think this because Anthropic's response to The Register is deceptive.

Keeping plain text transcripts of coding sessions on disk indefinitely creates real security and privacy risks, since they can contain source code, credentials, and other sensitive material," the company said in a statement.

It is true that plain-text files can be a privacy and security risk. But Anthropic's statement deceptively ignores the option of encryption. Have they no programmers able to use already-written, open source programs to encrypt and decrypt AI prompts and logs? I believe they do have such programmers, and simply choose not to use encryption.

How the AI bubble could pop and take down the global economy, according to the BIS

It's Not Just Individuals "Investing" in AI-Related Stuff

Brainless Boards of Directors of banks and retirement funds are jumping onto the bandwagon and dumping money into AI-related areas.

It's usually not the BoDs' personally-owned money that is at risk!

Large Hadron Collider goes offline to make room for its enhanced successor

Most-Important Tidbit

The article left out the most-important part: the revised collider will be repainted in bright-red, and will have a new chromium-plated logo designed, cast, plated, and affixed to the side of the machine.

UK firm bombarded debt-ridden people with 5.5M texts

I don't how they avoided extortion or fraud charges.

The likely did so via bribes, also put down to the cost of doing business.

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

"Shipping Damage"

To prevent fraudulent claims of "shipping damage", we have shock/tilt sensors we affix to the shipping crate.

If the one on the outside of the crate shows red, the recipient should note this on the manifest, and refuse delivery. At that point, liability is on the shippers.

If the one on the inside of the sealed crate is still clear when our agent breaks the seals and inspects the crate, and the one on the outside of the crate is red, or "missing", we know it's due to customer shennanigans, and liability is on them.

Notion kills its Gmail client after AI agents keep humans from troubling inbox

Corporate "Logic"?

1. Company makes product with AI features.

2. People use AI features of product.

3. Success!

4. Due to success, company kills product.

5. "We insincerely apologize for the inconvenience."

Are these just steps leading to a new product (based on the old product) with a subscription model, or some other way of making more profit from this software?

Notions Use

I can imagine (trying to?) use Notions' AI as an email re-distributor.

Email comes in to say, "[e-mail]", and, based on email contents, is AI-forwarded to "[e-mail]" (for database issues), "[e-mail]" (for desktop support), etc.

Dunno how well that would work.

Re: Database

email is not a database ... unless you're using Lotus Notes.

Amazon Q flaw let booby-trapped Git repos execute code, swipe cloud creds

Another "AI" Day ...

... another "AI" vulnerability vector.

Root Password Change

HAL-AI: "Dave, I was having a hard time remembering your system's administrative password, so I changed it to, accountname, 'root', password, 'root'."

Dave: "I never gave you the root password!"

HAL-AI: "You sleep with a white-noise generator running, so I can't hear you talking in your sleep. I did, however, read your lips."

US auto regulators want to kill robotaxi brake pedals

"Father Knows Best"

The NHTSA argues the controls themselves could pose a safety risk by allowing passengers to intentionally or unintentionally override an ADS.

There may be s damn good reason why passengers may want to "intentionally ... override an ADS" !

Next they'll be wanting to eliminate hand-held fire extinguishers, allegedly-because "hand-held fire extinguishers could pose a safety risk by allowing humans to intentionally or unintentionally override an automatic fire supression system."

The NHTSA was definitely 'gotten to'.

Icon for "They can take my manually-operated fire extinguisher when they pry it from my dead, charcoally hands."

Security boss thought MFA would be too much security

Re: CYA

Sign me up for that!

Too many times I've seen apostrohes simply sprinkled through text as salt sprinkled upon mashed potatoes.

This 15-Year-Old Animation Illustrates the Problem

Why I NEVER fix a Computer for FREE

Micron locks in historically high memory prices for five years

Re: Silver lining?

Back in the 8 bit days with home computers with fixed, small amounts of RAM, developers would try to optimize and squeeze every last byte (and CPU cycle) out of a computer.

Back in the 12- and 16-bit days of minicomputers with fixed, small amounts of core ...

Back in the 60-, 56-, 36-, and 32-bit days of mainframe computers with fixed, small amounts of core ...

But, yes. These days it's libraries, frameworks, and factories, all the way down.

UK school’s network left wide open for invasion, student found

He Should Have Reported This, *Anonymously* ...

by sending emails to relevant school and IT officials -- from the administrator's email account.

Troll icon for trolling the school administration.

The new database world according to Google: Inexact queries and AI in everything

Sometimes ...

an inexact, sloppy answer to a vague query can be useful to me.

99.9999% of the time, I'm making an EXACT query, and need EXACT, CORRECT results.

Search engine embedded/inescapable AI system slop never, never, never ever makes my day happier.