Posts by pip25

Lockheed Martin demos 50kW anti-aircraft frickin' laser beam

"Affordable"

By US military standards, I'm sure.

City council cans ERP project, keeps details of replacement supplier secret

ERPs are horrible

There is definitely a demand for centralized solutions that can do most things or at least are customizable enough to be adapted to an organization's needs, but what is currently on the market seems to range from bad to worse. The "least bad" one my company bought is the bane of my existence. ;_;

LastPass admits attackers have a copy of customers’ password vaults

Re: A unique memorable password?

That must be a real joy to type in on a phone.

OpenAI predicts biz can break a billion in revs by 2024

I predict that I will also make billions in 2023

Please send me money. Cash is preferred.

Google's Dart language soon won't take null for an answer

Re: I don't see a problem with null

Optional has its place, especially in public APIs, but I agree that wrapping everything is simply more verbose without substantial gains in safety when it comes to Java.

Someone has to say it: Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech

Re: I'm full of it too.

This is brilliant. Will be using it from now on, if you don't mind.

UK competition watchdog investigates Apple and Google 'stranglehold' over the mobile market

At last!

With the CMA on the case, I'm sure their reign of terror will come to a swift end!

...And pigs will fly!

Feel Luckey, punk? Oculus designer builds VR murder headset

What an idiot

See title.

The fact that he spent time and money on this speaks volumes about him as a person.

Microsoft tests 'upsells' of its products in Windows 11 sign-out menu

Of course they've lost their damn minds

But that's hardly recent or surprising.

Windows Subsystem for Android declared ready for prime time

Re: "Because we CAN!" (maniacal laugh)

There are some control apps for smart home hardware that do not have desktop equivalents. At all.

It's a sneaky way to force people to use their paid cloud offerings, because you're obviously not going to leave your tablet on 24/7 just to record security camera footage. Being able to run a mobile app on a PC does come in handy in such cases.

More than 4 in 10 PCs still can't upgrade to Windows 11

"Windows 11 is the best growth prospect for the PC industry in the next year"

If so, then I guess the industry really is in a bad shape.

TSMC downgraded as analysts warn of worst slump in a decade

Chip shortages?

Whatever happened to those? Asking because the car companies are still complaining about it.

You can't possibly mean... they're lying? :P

Nvidia admits mistake, 'unlaunches' 12GB RTX 4080

Re: I don't believe it

You can't unlaunch something that has never really launched in the first place... and it's doubtful whether it ever will.

Intel: We're inching closer to mass production of spin qubit chips

1.7 Kelvin?

I guess Intel will actually have a valid reason for changing the socket layout this time, since I suspect my existing cooling setup may not be up to the task.

Steganography alert: Backdoor spyware stashed in Microsoft logo

So if the payload was encoded in the image found in the artcle....

...does that mean that The Register is now hosting malware?

Google kills off Stadia

This may come back to bite Google eventually

Not the axing of Stadia, specifically, but the general reputation of shutting down services whenever they feel like it. I for one sure as hell won't recommend Google services for customer projects anymore, unless I am absolutely certain they'll be online only for a couple of months, maybe a year at most.

Retbleed slugs VM performance by up to 70 percent in kernel 5.19

Speculative execution exploits in the wild?

Do we know of instances where these vulnerabilities were successfully exploited by malware to steal sensitive info? The performance hits of the mitigations being as severe as they are, enabling them for use cases such home PCs does not seem like an entirely straightforward question.

Banned Tornado Cash code reuploaded to GitHub in free speech test

Github is not the government, so first amendment doesn't really apply, but...

The problem with that (logically sound) argument is that companies these days have power over regular people that is at least comparable to that of the government. Companies can choose who they do business with, sure. But what happens if said companies not only refuse to host your source code or publish your writings, but also sell you water and electricity? Or food? What good is having rights to free speech if you are deprived of a platform to exercise it to any significant degree? Even if all of that is not happening, at least not to everyone, right now, I find the possibility worrying at the very least.

Virgin Galactic delays commercial suborbital flights again

They still haven't started yet?

I know everything space-related is hard, but after their fully crewed flight a year ago, I would have though they didn't have that many boxes left to check. Silly me, I guess. Question is, how much money do they have left to burn?

Software issues cost Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess his job

Sadly unsurprising

As long as someone in the food chain keeps pulling those deadlines out of their nether regions, software development will continue to suffer at VW. (Something tells me it's not the developers themselves.)

Latest example: level 4 self-driving by 2025. You know, the same level basically no one has achieved yet? Surely VW have thought this through? Oh wait, of course not.

Upgrading what might be the world's oldest running Linux install

I don't believe in the Windows reinstall

I had to do it exactly once, when a lovely uninstall program wiped out my Windows directory (or at least the parts it could). Luckily, I was able to preserve most installation and registry data even then.

That was in the Windows 98 years. Since then, my desktop PC has always been upgraded to the next OS version, including a switch to the 64 bit architecture thanks to some brilliant third-party software.

Needless to say, this article truly warms my heart. :)

Demand for smartphones is drying up

Nothing on offer interests me

I miss the days when I spent my time looking at all the cool new PC parts and phones on sale, each one different and interesting in its own way, and dreaming of buying them (pocket money made that a no-go) or at least asking my parents to buy one for my birthday.

Now I have my own income, I could afford to buy one of these every once in a while, but... there is no point. All phones look the same, heck, they often have LESS features than previous generations. I felt no need to change anything in my desktop PC for the past 4 years. First world problems, I know, but the little kid in me is quite disappointed.

Slack to increase prices for Pro customers

We never got that into Slack

The paid version was already expensive enough that our company refused to buy it, and the free version was annoying enough that after the initial hype, activity slowly died out on the server. Our team moved to Skype (gasp) last month; we discussed Teams as well, but the majority hated the client with a passion.

Microsoft delays controversial ban on paid-for open source, WebKit in app store

Re: The guy apologises and in marches the drama brigade

We are not talking about Joe the developer making an unfortunate decision, and then retracting it. We're talking about Microsoft, one of the giants of the industry; this decision had to go through several levels and had to be accepted by all of them, which makes it less likely to be an honest mistake.

This is also not the first such controversial decision by Microsoft in the recent past, which again makes it seem more like they are testing what they can get away with, instead of trying to do some good but failing.

Devops tool Jenkins now requires Java 11: This might sting a bit

Thankfully it doesn't matter much in practice

Just because Jenkins itself runs on Java 11/17, it can still launch builds with arbitrary JDK versions available on the machine (or on the slave node running the build). Unless your Jenkins uses some very special plugins that break because of the upgrade, most users should not be significantly affected.

Mega's unbreakable encryption proves to be anything but

Weird timing

Mega has been around for many years, it's reasonably well known, how come no one tried hacking it before? Or have previous attempts failed and these disclosed vulnerabilities are more complex than they seem at first glance?

A miserable work week spent toiling inside 'the metaverse'

Re: But... but... but...

Ah, Minority Report UX. That was a sad mess even before VR. Leap Motion came out with hardware that can track your hand movements - but it turned out that swiping your hand in front of a screen for any meaningful amount of time is just incredibly awkward and tiring! Perhaps metaverse developers should take note...

How did you mourn Internet Explorer's passing?

IE died

Now we have Chrome dominating the browser market instead.

Yay?

Google engineer suspended for violating confidentiality policies over 'sentient' AI

I remember this article about Facebook moderators

It mentioned how people usually can't stay in the position for too long, because all the stuff they have to look through on a daily basis is detrimental to their mental health.

Apparently something similar applies to talking too much with advanced Google chatbots.

AI chatbot trained on posts from web sewer 4chan behaved badly – just like human members

Outraaage

I can't help but be incredibly amused that people still find reasons to be outraged about something connected to 4chan after all these years.

Microsoft confirms HoloLens boss Alex Kipman to be reorganized out the door

Too bad

Augmented reality still seems to have more potential applications than "vanilla" VR. Sad to see it's not really getting anywhere.

Next major update of Windows 11 prepares for launch

"Commercial Windows Insiders"

Good Lord, these exist?? What sort of commercial entities willingly run an OS with pre-release software?

Experts: AI inventors' designs should be protected in law

I would sooner grant copyright to a monkey taking a photo...

...than I would grant patents to AI. And the courts decided that a monkey is not eligible to receive copyright protection, so...

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 splashes down on Win Server 2022

Re: Huge Improvement

Actually, WSL2 still uses Hyper-V under the hood, it's just less obvious to the user.

Google makes outdated apps less accessible on Play Store

What's the point?

If these old apps worked fine on older Android versions, why would they pose any additional risk on newer ones, as long as the API calls remain compatible?

Atlassian Jira, Confluence outage persists two days on

Maintenance script?

It's hard to imagine how such a script can cause several days of outage, unless it involved "maintaining" the customer database and their backups by deleting them all.

Android's Messages, Dialer apps quietly sent text, call info to Google

"Essential" analytics data only

The problem is that, since Google is first and foremost an ad company, all your data is "essential" to them.

This browser-in-browser attack is perfect for phishing

Re: Skins and themes

"Emulating my xfce look and feel - customized with a local theme - may be rather safe."

How would the malicious code gather information on the current theme settings of the browser/OS? Is there an API for that I'm not aware of? That's what really puzzles me about this attack.

Microsoft faces EU antitrust complaint from OVHcloud

"(...) quite late in the process"

Are we? I'm not seeing anything in the article that suggests that this complaint will get anywhere anytime soon, unfortunately.

Boys outnumber girls 6 to 1 in UK compsci classes

Six to one? Sounds like an improvement to me

Back when I started out at university, 20 years ago, we could fill a 250+ auditorium. There were two girls among us. TWO. Granted, this was in Central Europe.

Brave takes the spring out of creepy bounce tracking

Interesting

How widespread is this bounce tracking these days? This is the first time I have heard of it, but maybe that's just me being ignorant.

Startups competing with OpenAI's GPT-3 all need to solve the same problems

"We really shouldn't have a world where every single company is training their own GPT-3"

Yet, on a smaller scale, this is pretty much what is happening, right? Thank goodness we have OpenAI, who knows how terrible things would be if they were called ClosedAI or something. </sarcasm>

BOFH: The Geek's Countergambit – outwitted at an electronics store

Re: If you really want to take advantage of the i11

You actually made me look that up. I do not regret it.

Flutter flits onto Windows, declared fit for production

Checked it out

Apparently, Flutter webapps are one big canvas tag. Not sure how I feel about this. Accessibility is probably a concern.

12-year-old revives Unity desktop, develops software repo client, builds gaming environment for Ubuntu...

On the bright side

If he's only allowed two hours of programming a day, he's unlikely to burn out anytime soon.

(*checks logged work hours for today in despair*)

COVID-19 was a generational opportunity for change at work – and corporate blew it

Re: On the flip-side...

Is it impossible? No.

Is it harder? Yes.

Remote communication adds overhead, and results in a loss of opportunity to exchange ideas. Sometimes this is unavoidable, but that fact in itself does not make its downsides any better.

Re: On the flip-side...

Agreed completely. For me, having to work from home was a dreadful experience, and even now that I can go back to the office, it's still far from how it used to be... simply because most people stayed at home!

Our company had an active community, you could be on good terms with a lot of people who you never worked together on the same project, we had events, dojos, etc. together that were a lot of fun.

Now though? The project team is all that remains. I have people I have talked to maybe once in two years, because paradoxically, there is no opportunity to do so. (Obviously I don't want to interrupt them during work, I hate it when people do that to me without any reason aside from wanting to chat.) Community events are a shadow of their former selves - sure, dojos still exist, but they are simply yet another Zoom meeting.

Even project work suffered. Has anyone tried training junior devs in a project without meeting them once? It's horrible. When I was a beginner, I learned a lot of things simply by paying attention to how others work and talk with each other. That opportunity is gone now. And while previously I could casually ask a teammate, in passing, how a certain piece of work is coming along (so I can help them if they're stuck and don't want to ask for assistance for whatever reason, a common beginner mistake), doing the same thing now via Skype or Slack or whatever comes across as cyberstalking. We get less work done, the work quality suffers and people do not improve at the same pace they used to.

Is this the so-called "generational opportunity"? For me, it certainly isn't.

Ad blockers altering website code is not a copyright violation, German court rules

Great idea

I'm going to sue the ad networks next, claiming they are trespassing on my computer when I surf the web. My ad blocker should make my intent perfectly clear to them, yet they still insist on getting around it. How dare they.

Malaysia tweaks copyright law to hit streamers of copyright-infringing content

"Guilty until proven innocent"

I hope the lawmakers will be able to experience first-hand what they have unleashed upon their citizens.

Database company Cockroach Labs more than doubles in value to $5bn

It's pretty good, too

In my experience, anyway. It delivers on its promises, even if some functionality you'd take for granted in an SQL DB, like triggers, is still missing.