Posts by Andy E

Cyber exec with lavish lifestyle charged with selling secrets to Russia

Re: Spy V Spy

I do and it was Mad.

AI is the flying car of the mind: An irresistible idea nobody knows how to land or manage

I think you have hit the nail on the head with your last two sentences: "I mean, we still have a large majority of the population that believes that not working while able is intrinsically immoral, and that material wealth is a worthy goal in itself. As long as philosophies like that are prevalent, drudgery is here to stay."

The current prevalent society requires you to do some work (in whatever form) so you earn and can afford necessities, and if you earn enough, luxuries. Until that changes work will mean drudgery for some.

UK and US security agencies order urgent fixes as Cisco firewall bugs exploited in wild

Unbelievable!

Cisco has a long history of producing network gear where security is an important feature, so why haven't their code writing and QA processes evolved to avoid and/or detect security bugs before the product is released?

Reg readers have spoken: 93% back move away from Microsoft in UK public sector

What if.....

It's just a thought but if the Government was to promote FOSS within the Civil Service and Government organizations, why don't they encourage schools and collages to use and teach classes on FOSS office applications? They would make a saving in license costs, while turning out a steady stream of people who could use alternative M365 software.

SK Telecom walloped with $97M fine after schoolkid security blunders let attackers run riot

Did anyone get fired?

Given the criminal negligence, someone must have been fired.

Why the UK public sector still creaks along on COBOL

The AI bandwagon

I'm appalled at the Governments championing of AI and trying to fit it into every service as a solution (the Microsoft approach?). The technology just doesn't seem stable or ready for production use as a general tool. Yes, there has been achievements where its been used for a very specific use with a limited scope, but not as a general purpose tool. See https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-ai-was-fed-sloppy-code-it-turned-into-something-evil-20250813/

Even if it did work, AI would struggle to fix the issues caused by disjointed IT systems used by Government departments and quangos that were implemented as point solutions to requirements that have subsequently changed.

Microsoft-owned GitHub: Open source needs funding. Ya think?

Proprietary?

If I understand this right an American owned company running proprietary software, is advocating that the EU give them lots of money as part of the EU's sovereign technology push to reduce their dependance on American technology.

Boffins detail new algorithms to losslessly boost AI perf by up to 2.8x

Confused

I'm having trouble with this analogy "The whole concept is a bit like predictive text on a modern smartphone. As you type, it tries to guess what you're going to say next. When it's right, you can complete the sentence with a single tap; when it's wrong, you just type it out yourself."

I know what the answer should be with predictive text because of prior knowledge. How does the LLM know that the predicted tokens are right or wrong? Does it have prior knowledge?

Cold without the compressor: Boffins build better ice box

Re: Room temperature?

So it could be hotter or cooler than 27C?

LLM providers on the cusp of an 'extinction' phase as capex realities bite

I wonder....

....if anyone is keeping a tally of how many predictions Gartner get right v how many they get wrong. As a ratio I would expect it to be 1 (right) : large number (wrong).

Rocket Lab says NASA lacks leadership on Mars Sample Return

Re: Size of problem

The approach they are taking is to send the rocket (Earth Return Orbiter) to be used for returning the samples to Earth to a martian orbit (it won't land on Mars). It won't need to be as powerful or need as much fuel as a rocket that has to land and take off from Mars before journying back to Earth.

A good kind of disorder: Boffins boost capacitor tech by disturbing dipoles

Breakdown?

This statement "the number of charge–discharge cycles that occur before breakdown" got me thinking. Are manufacturers building circuit boards with components that they know are going to fail?

Whats the limit for charge–discharge cycles before breakdown occures and is the breakdown catastrophic?

BOFH: Come on down to the dunge– erm … basement

Re: VAX Macro Manuals

They were the days! I cut my teeth on a VAX 11/780. First with Macro and then with Bliss32. I then joined DEC as a VMS consultant.

To this very day I maintain that DCL was the best command line environment ever invented.

Oh look, cracking down on Big Tech works. Brave, Firefox, Vivaldi surge on iOS

I did wonder about this. The only competition will be between different implementations of the Chromium browser engine.

IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

Ironic

This coming from a company that has demonstrated its disdain for employee's who are over 50.

Perhaps that's why they want to recruit more younger people. On the other hand, if companies valued their over 50's workforce they might stick around for a bit longer.

HPE's updated Spaceborne Computer-2 ready to hitch another ride to the ISS

That's a lot of SSD's gone kaputt

The 45% failure rate of SSD's over a two year period is a bit concerning surely?

OSIRIS-REx's stuck asteroid sample canister finally cracked open by NASA

Just wondering....

I'd be interested to read the report on the stuck canister. What caused the issues preventing it from being opened?

40 years since Elite became the most fun you could have with 22 kilobytes

The inspiration for Oolite

I didn't play Elite at the time of its release as I didn't have a compatible computer. Many years later I discovered Oolite which is a modern take on Elite. Over the years it has been expanded and refined. It even includes the facility for people to define missions - tasks which have to be completed in usually very specific ways. I still play it occasionally. Have a look: https://oolite.space/

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

Re: "their substantial egos"

I'm sure the instruction book that came with the ZX81 had a picture of a ZX81 controlling a factory. It might have even been a power station. The memory is hazy but it does show the ambition of the Sinclair people :-)

Microsoft confirms Smart App issue renaming everyone's printers to HP

Many years ago....

...there was a thing called Quality Assurance. I seem to remember it involved a lot of testing. I wonder what happened to it?

Scared of flying? Good news! Software glitches keep aircraft on the ground

It's complicated....

It's fascinating reading the comments but its clear people don't have any idea how complicated air traffic control is or how it works. With long distance flights that terminate or cross UK airspace, the flight plans are passed to NATS 4 hours before the aircraft enters UK airspace. So the plane may well be in the air by the time NATS gets the flight plan. The flight plans are submitted to a local or regional organisation who does some validity checks before routing it to the authorities who manage the airspace the flight crosses. These organisations will have different systems so there may be a lot of data translation involved. The software module that crashed validates the flight plan and adds UK specific information to it for the air traffic controllers before passing it to the next system. That it caught the error is good but that it failed in the way it did was not so good. In the bigger picture, things failed safely.

For an even more embarrassing episode concerning NATS and software not behaving as expected, read the report of the 12th December 2014 air traffic fiasco.

Boffins reckon Mars colony could survive with fewer than two dozen people

Social organisation?

I'm wondering what type of social organisation they modeled. Initially its probably a dictatorship model with a defined hierarchy but as the number of colonists grow does it change? What if groups break away?

Interesting stuff.

What would sustainable security even look like?

Re: Nobody is legally responsible, oops

You have hit the nail on the head in that the problem is nobody is legally accountable for security lapses. Until that is fixed there is very little incentive to invest in effective information security.

Introducing accountability for security may have unintended consequences but it is badly needed.

Clingy Virgin Media won't let us leave, customers complain

They are very poor

I switched from Virgin Media to BT as I was out of contract and the BT deal was cheaper than any of the deals Virgin Media offered me. Choice from VM was limited as I was not a new customer. When I pointed out that the deal they were pushing was more expensive than the one I had been on and the rival package, they said it was the best they could do. Apart from the hassle of talking to the sales bods switching was relativity straight forward. They did ring me about a month after I had left them to offer me a new deal. Talk about desperate measures!

Another thing I hated about Virgin Media was their Customer portal. It was clunky and hard to navigate once you had logged in. The UI seemed to gave been designed in the last century. And don't even think about IPv6 as they have never heard of it.

California man's business is frustrating telemarketing scammers with chatbots

I think it might be an improvement!

Microsoft tackles SaaSy URL sprawl, dumping its dotcom in favor of cloud.microsoft

What is a "cross-app experience"?

Have I had one? Do I need one?

Smallsats + solar sails = Photos of exoplanets at 1970s digital camera resolution

How do you stop?

Once the craft gets to the SGL focal region does it need to stop to take the photo? Or is the SGL focal region so big it can take one or more photo's as its passing through?

Firmware is on shaky ground – let's see what it's made of

While I agree that the vast majority of the Open Source community are striving for the common good, security is not necessarily their main objective. How do you know the firmware you have just downloaded is free of anything to create a bit of mischief?

The SolarWinds incident showed what can happen when someone broke the weakest link in a supply chain.

Fancy trying the granddaddy of Windows NT for free? Now's your chance

Those were the days

Those were the days! I was a VMS specialist from v3 through to v6 and even worked for DEC for the majority of that time. Writing a file archiving system in Bliss 32 was probably the peak moment. In some ways VMS spoilt me as the DCL command language was consistent and intuitive. Want to print the file Myfile.txt? try $ Print Myfile.txt I even wrote an application in DCL for a client.

Whenever I dip my toes into the Linux terminal it always seems to be just a mess. Non-intuitive commands and each one has its own non-standard switches and options.

While I have a soft spot and high regard for VMS, I can't think of a single application I use that would run on it.

Microsoft freaks out users with Windows 11 warning: 'LSA protection is off'

Re: Hi Bill

We used to run competitions in the office to see how long you could string them along before they hung up on you. I think the record holder was one hour, 3 minutes and 4 seconds.

Windows 11 update breaks PCs that dare sport a custom UI

I did wonder

"Microsoft said it is investing the problem..." So that's how they make their money! They invest in problems.

Spotted in the wild: Chimera – a Linux that isn't GNU/Linux

But why?

I can understand removing SystemD but why the push to remove GNU?

Just curious.

NASA, DARPA to go nuclear in hopes of putting boots on Mars

Where is the handbrake?

The only way it can shorten the travel time is by going faster but how do you slow it down when it gets there?

Laser-wielding boffins bend lightning to their will

What about the other way?

I can see this working well for lightning strikes that are going earth to cloud but what about when they are traveling down from cloud to earth. Won't something get frazzled?

New York cracks down on carbon fuel-based crypto-mining operations

Re: Crypto currency would go away if

There's so many things wrong with this post. All metals are traded (including gold, silver and copper). The price of them will fluctuate depending on demand and supply. Even when it was used as a backing for a currency, the gold standard was a volatile monetary system.

IBM sues Micro Focus, claims it copied Big Blue mainframe software

Re: Venue and jurisdiction is going to complicate this

As they are being sued in New York I'm not sure that UK law will prevail.

NASA wants a hundredfold upgrade for space computers

Re: Extra redundancy

Now that the USA has manned spaceflight capability, I wonder if there is any merit in another servicing mission to Hubble.

UK hospitals lose millions after AI startup valuation collapses

Shoddy reporting

This is just sensationalism and widely distorting the truth. The various trusts didn't actually pay any money for the shares. They provided data and in return were given some shares which are now pretty much worthless. THEY HAVE NOT LOST ANY MONEY. You could summarize it as they were tricked into giving away data for free but even that's a distortion of the facts.

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

Support?

One of the things that gets overlooked is the availability of the skill set(s) required to support the end users. With a Microsoft environment there's a ready supply of skilled people mostly due to its sheer market dominance. With a Linux environment the choices of distributions, desktops and applications which will do what the the company wants, ensures that the chosen solution will likely require a rare and possibly unique skill set to support. There won't be many suitably skilled people around to staff up the support team.

British boffins make touchless computing tech on the cheap

Re: Where's the God in this?

Excuse me but how is Google going to serve you the right advert if it can't analyze your gesture, eye movement, voice pitch or breathing?

Health trusts swapped patient data for shares in an AI firm. They may have lost millions

Lost money?

If I understand this correctly the NHS trusts haven't lost any money as they didn't spend any. They were swapping anonymised patient records for shares in the startup company. Its a very poor headline.

Meta now involved in making metalevel standards for the metaverse

Re: Seeking education here...

I was wondering exactly the same thing as I wear glasses. The lenses are different for left and right.

Perhaps were not the target audience as they desperately try to make this mainstream.

Tweaks to IPv4 could free up 'hundreds of millions of addresses'

Virgin Media home routers don't know what IPv6 is. They only do IPv4.

Sick of Windows but can't afford a Mac? Consult our cynic's guide to desktop Linux

My 1st attempt

An old PC I had failed (motherboard failure). I tried to move the hard drive to another box I had but Windows wouldn't entertain that. That gave me the opportunity to stuff in some spare hard drives and an SSD and install Linux Mint. Perhaps I should mention that at that time I had no prior experience of installing any type of Linux,

My mistake was wanting to use the hard drives in a particular way (SSD for system, medium sized HD for Home and the big HD for general stuff). It took an awful lot of googling and multiple installs to get it how I wanted. Quite a steep learning curve if you want something different to a default install.

While I cursed a lot during the build I've grown to like Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop. It's similar enough to Windows so I can just get on and do the stuff I want to do. I will be moving more systems over to Linux as they don't have the hardware spec for Windows 11 put are perfectly good PC's.

Start your engines: Windows 11 ready for broad deployment

Goodbye Windows 11

With no prior Linux experience, I built a Linux Mint system last year for a project. The experience was "interesting", but I got there in the end.

If Microsoft get rid of local accounts then I'm afraid that might be the final straw and the three windows machines used every day will be going Minty too.

Microsoft-backed robovans to deliver grub in London

Parking like a human

Having to contend with "parked" delivery vans from Asda and Ocado as they deliver their orders is a daily challenge here. They just seem to stop as close to the target address as they can ignoring any no parking restrictions and/or blocking access roads, driveways etc.. How are they going to teach robots to do that?

Lawyers say changes to UK data law will make life harder for international businesses

Additional and unnecessary costs

Developing a DP regime that substantially differs from GDPR will add additional and unnecessary costs to the businesses and organisations that have to comply with its requirements.

I can't see what the attraction is, except to monetarize and share the data subjects personal data without their knowledge or consent (that's the "innovation" bit).

Intuit sued over alleged cryptocurrency thefts via Mailchimp intrusion

Pot meet Kettle

One of the main points seems to be that Mailchimp fell for a phishing attack which led to the claimants falling for a phishing attack.

I do think they have a valid point about the time taken to alert the users about the attack though.

Windows 11 growth at a standstill amid stringent hardware requirements

Re: Is anyone else seeing a major opening for switching to another Operating System?

I have a laptop and a desk top that quite happily run Windows 10 and are fine for what they are used for. However, they don't meet the requirements for Windows 11. Assuming they continue to run and have the performance needed, I will be moving them to Linux Mint when W10 goes EOL.

I expect this (Linux) will be the fate for many W10 boxes which is probably a good thing. Why throw away a perfectly good computer?

The wild world of non-C operating systems

Re: Multics & PL/I

I actually wrote extensions to VMS in Macro-32 before switching to Bliss-32 after a training course.

This was of course many, many years ago......