Posts by alain williams

Developers beware, Microsoft's domain shakeup is coming soon

Why break things with gratuitous change ?

Microsoft does not seem to understand the concept of stability.

Can AI shorten PC replacement cycles? Dell seems to think so

Re: My desktop is 10 years old

Yes, I could make a Linux box last 10 years but I'd rather spend my time being productive myself than spending it on keeping my kit productive

You are suggesting that I spend lots of time maintaining the system as the hardware is old. Not true. Replacing the PSU and CPU fan [I forgot to mention] did not take long.

Other admin: apt-get update/upgrade, backups, etc, all would be needed on new hardware.

The most time spent was when I moved from CentOS to Debian after RedHat went rogue on the GPL.

My desktop is 10 years old

Runs the latest version of Debian without any problem at all.

I had to replace the PSU a few years ago - but that is about it. Prolly good for a few more years yet.

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

Re: If ever there was a use case for LLM

But when the LLM has a hallucination resulting in a command being sent that trashes Voyager - then what ?

V1 is priceless, irreplaceable - handle with extreme care!

Trump 'tried to sell Truth Social to Musk' as SPAC deal stalled

I almost fell off my chair ...

I misread the headline as "Trump reportedly tried to tell Truth ..." and had an attack of cognitive dissonance!

Juno fly-by detects lower levels of oxygen on Europa than expected

But when life got going on earth ...

there was no free oxygen so why is it thought necessary for life on Europa ?

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

Oh, come on - this is elementary

Dealing with February in leap years is an exercise in basic programming. If programmers cannot cope, or do not think, about this then they should not be in the job.

Having said that: there are many out there who are not competent :-(

Rivian decimates staff to put a brake on spending

Gosh: proper use of the word "decimate" !

Rivian is laying off 10 percent of its salaried employees

All too often it is used to mean "lots". Congratulations Mr Vigliarolo

Amazon hopes to avoid labor regulation by simply abolishing national watchdogs

So who do you support ?

The poor or the rich, powerful, well connected ?

I suppose it depends if you are poor or rich.

City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M

Re: What would it cost ...

The idea of having a preferred supplier for HM's DP Systems is not inherently bad

The project being open source would help with that.

What would it cost ...

for the UK government to commission a local authority managements system that it would release as open source ? An up-front cost that would save billions later on. Call it LAsoft.

I am aware that not all local authorities have the same requirements but the core ones must be similar. It could also influence legislation: ie Parliament not enacting laws until LAsoft was able to support it.

I know that the failed unified NHS system casts a long shadow here, but maybe those mistakes could be learned. Part of it is making local authorities have common working procedures unless there was good reason not to - eg Urban/rural requirements.

A home grown approach would also stop us bleeding money to large overseas corporations and would build expertise in the UK.

Timescale ? 5 - 10 years maybe.

Top five reasons to move from CentOS to RHEL (according to Red Hat)

After almost 30 years ...

of using Red Hat or Centos I am moving my servers to Debian.

Why ? I cannot stomach the way that red hat takes open source code and stops others from distributing it.

Insider steals 79,000 email addresses at work to promote own business

Re: Slap on the wrist?

this moron\wcrook should be required to personally compensate everyone whose email he compromised.

A minimum of £5/head would be good. This might deter other, in the future, of doing likewise.

Every Saturday in the local market in the stocks would be a nice addition - especially of the rotten tomatoes were to be paid for by him.

Vietnam to collect biometrics - even DNA - for new ID cards

How long before this happens in other countries ?

Who will see this as the way to go.

Chunks of deorbiting ESA satellite are expected to reach the ground

Only when there are 100 billion events that "happen all the time".

As far as I am aware there is only one satellite that is deorbiting.

Someone had to say it: Scientists propose AI apocalypse kill switches

No kill switches in AIs in island volcanoes

be they owned by a white cat stroking Blofeld or anyone else.

The worst that these restrictions can do is to delay unapproved use of AI. Big crooks and national governments (**) will be able to get what they want, especially governments. Are AIs being put to good use ? The answer depends on where your affiliations lie.

** Sometimes I am not sure of the distinction

Cybercriminals are stealing iOS users' face scans to break into mobile banking accounts

Grow a beard to change your face

I suppose that that is what you have to do as you would do with a compromised password.

Not so easy for the ladies.

Was this not inevitable ?

HP CEO pay for 2023 = 270,315 printer cartridges

How much ink ?

Taking the average of regular volume HP cartridges as 5.7ml then 270,315 of them is 1,544 litres or in el-reg units 266 footballs.

250 million-plus reserved IPv4 addresses could be released – but the internet isn’t built to use them

Re: IPv6

No more excuses, it is not that hard.

My hosted servers have used IPv6 for 20+ years, I have had IPv6 at home for 15 years.

Work to resolve binary babble from Voyager 1 is ongoing

That depends on how large Martians are ?

The Romans defined a mile as 1,000 paces.

Restrictive licensing keeps businesses grounded in cloud vendor vortex

Is anyone surprised ?

Large corporate does whatever it can to stop a level playing field.

Not really very different from what HP does with printers.

JetBrains' unremovable AI assistant meets irresistible outcry

Not knowing what words mean

My favourite hate of misused words is "regular", eg "we will do this more regularly" - where what they mean is "frequently". Often said by people who should know better.

Maybe I am just showing my age.

ESA salutes Galileo satellite system meeting aviation standards

How much does this increase GNSS robustness ?

All sorts of entities meddle with GPS, does this make it twice as hard to disrupt ?

How much more does it cost to add Galileo to GPS in an aircraft or missile ?

GPS interference now a major flight safety concern for airline industry

Is it naive to suggest ...

that aircraft GPS receivers should only look upwards as that is where the GPS satellites are ? Yes: I know that there are not a vast number of the satellites and so that some might, at times, appear close to the horizon ...

Different for GPS receivers in cars/ships/... which are not high up.

Microsoft hits $3 trillion as investors drink AI Kool-Aid

How about putting 0.1% of that

into QA - ie test stuff before sending out to users as an update

Wait, hold on, everyone – Mozilla thinks Apple, Google, Microsoft should play fair

Re: Amazed that FF isn't used more

Because most people just accept the default - whatever it is. Partly due to sloth, partly ignorance that there is anything different.

What Microsoft's latest email breach says about this IT security heavyweight

"Microsoft makes a good operating system"

Meyers then talks about applications (eg Powerpoint).

Microsoft seems to approach security just as it does testing of software updates: toss it over the wall and let customers do the QA for them.

This approach is bad enough for updates but criminal for security.

White goods giant fires legal threats to unplug open source plugin

So the washing machine connects to AWS

would it not be cheaper for them to enable the machines to connect to an address on the local network - ie somewhere reachable by the house holder's WIFI ? Then there would be zero cost to Haier.

The downside to Haier would be loss of all that lovely data as to how often I wash my sox and underwear.

Microsoft touts migration to Windows 11 as painless, though wallets may disagree

Re: Pointless

Exactly this. Outside the nerds/techies that inhabit el-Reg most people do not care about the operating system. As long as they can "go on the Internet" ("Eh, what do you mean 'browser' - what is that ?"), play music, games, edit a document, ... they are happy -- especially if things do not change at all.

Most would quite happily have stuck with Windows XP if microsoft had not killed it.

John Deere tractors get connectivity boost with Starlink deal

Who does this benefit ?

It will help John Deere remotely disable a machine if the owner has done something that JD deems criminal, eg: replacing a headlamp bulb without calling out a JD mechanic.

Infosys co-founder doubles down on call for 70-hour work weeks

Long hours

And who benefits from those long hours ? Today the Grauniad reports: World’s five richest men double their money as poorest get poorer

Google to lay Asia-Pacific to South America undersea cable

Will it add to Google snooping ?

Or will google be forbidden from inspecting traffic and so seeing who is talking to who ?

Biggest Linux kernel release ever welcomes bcachefs file system, jettisons Itanium

What a cheesy comment !

:-)

ShinyHunters chief phisherman gets 3 years, must cough up $5M

Is $5million his net worth ?

If not, why not ?

Please include monies that he might have salted away to family/friends.

Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal

Re: The way to deal with rich people....

As W S Gilbert wrote in the Mikado Let the punishment fit the crime.

Avoiding AI-capable PCs will be impossible by 2027

Re: Power Use

If that is all that she does then install Linux Mint with the MATE desktop - she will not notice much of a difference and the hardware will be good for many years to come.

UK PM promises faster justice for Post Office Horizon victims

Re: Hot air

They have delayed until it was impossible to continue to ignore it. Similar is happening with other scandals eg the Windrush people who were wrongly detained, deported, ... Will it take another TV drama for Sunak to suddenly become aware of this and expedite compensation ?

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

Sunak pushing back the date from 2030 to 2035

was an appalling row back on climate policy, this was done after the Uxbridge by-election as he thought that he could curry favour with the electorate -- thus putting party before climate; what a pathetic leader. He is accused of having ‘fingers in ears’ over climate change.

Pushing the date back helps to cover up inadequacy of provision of charging points - yet another government failure.

Three Chinese balloons float near Taiwanese airbase

China will be encouraged ...

by relative inaction in dealing with [[ie stopping]] other conflicts, notably Ukraine and Gaza.

Other than a few words little has happened about their abuses in Hong Kong.

Here's who thinks AI chatbots will eventually be smart enough to be your coworker

Clippy on steroids

This sounds like a complete nightmare.

Then what happens when it does the wrong thing ?

These will end up being used to deal with customers, especially by those companies that try and funnel you through dealing with queries only via a web form. When your situation is not one of the top 90% and you end up corresponding with an AI ... I suspect that many will just give up (which the company will like) and, next time, order from company that still uses humans (preferably UK based).

Hacktivists boast: We shut down Iran's gas pumps today

How stupid are both Hamas & Israeli governments

opening up another front in the war that these governments (both being terrorist) open up on each other. The only result is that innocent civilians are harmed and that their opposition becomes more enraged and do punches back hurting yet more innocents.

Of course there is virtue signalling "We delivered warnings to emergency services across the country before the operation began, ..." but that is complete bollocks that will be lapped up by partisan press.

If they want to do something: use their skills for true defence by protecting against intrusions from the other side ― but I doubt that they will as it is less exciting to brag about with their mates in the pub/... at the end of the day.

In the run up to Christmas what I want most is peace in this world, not slaughter of innocents on behalf of self serving politicians.

HP TV ads claim its printers are 'made to be less hated'

Advertisments and politicians have one thing in common ...

you start with the assumption that what they are saying is designed to pull the wool over your eyes.

Europe signs off on up to €1.2B in state aid for homegrown cloud project

This is what the UK should do

rather than lining the pockets of Amazon - which also has increased security risks (USA Patriot Act, etc).

It would also build up skills in the UK. I believe that this might be called investment, I do not know if our government knows what that means.

Spanish media sues Meta for ignoring GDPR and harvesting data

Re: Mmmm.....

the main message of which is "trust no one but us to tell you the truth".

You might want to check how truthful your favourite media is by looking at https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/

Car dealers openly beg Biden to put brakes on electric vehicle drive

Re: Cars dealer in America?

Don't mean to sound like an ad for Car-X, I just used it as an example because I'm happy with this one particular shop near where I live.

I do even better, I use a man who arrives, takes my car from my house to his lockup/... and brings it back when he is done. He knows what he is doing and is not expensive. He does not need to advertise - word of mouth and he is busy.

Profits or the planet ?

It seems that the dealers are more interested in their own profits.

Wayland takes the wheel as Red Hat bids farewell to X.org

Screensaver

But the Wayland compositor does the screen locker stuff - which is what you really need.

Show some fancy image or animation when it is locked ... who really cares ?

Waylan support is coming to the Mate desktop

Which is all that I really care about.

Ukraine cyber spies claim Putin's planes are in peril as sanctions bite

We now know why Yevgeny Prigozhin died

It now seems clear that stories of Putin ordering that his plane should crash were malicious. It is just that a lack of parts meant that it was not properly maintained.

I am glad that this is cleared up.

Meta sued by privacy group over pay up or click OK model

How much does FB benefit from nonFB users ?

I have never had a FB account, use Javascript blockers, etc. However FB know about me since friends use it, mention me and have me in their contacts list. So FB has almost certainly got a shadow profile of me, something that it has built without my consent - which seems to be a breach of the GDPR. Something that they should be challenged in court about.

They might not be able to show me advertising, targetted or not, but knowing who I know helps them build their graph of personal interests and so must help them earn. How much I do not know, but not £0.