Posts by PhilipN

Torvalds challenged the haters to fork Linux. Someone said 'hold my beer'

Kernel 0.what??

Must be the one I tried when first checking out this strange thing called Yggdrasil*

* Confession : Had to look it up to verify spelling

TSMC's $265B US fab pledge is the outline of a concept of a plan

Re: On the other hand...

"threatened with restricted market access"- explain

Where are the engineers going too come from?

China produces 10 times as many as the USA every year. India 5 times.

Zuck's AI ambitions put Meta on course to become America's next big cloud provider

Zuck grinning

I hope that was an AI-produced "photo". It's nightmarish.

David Potter, the man who put Psion in the palm of your hand, logs off at 82

Thanks, Dave

And Psion 5mx - still the best portable keyboard ever.

HS2's latest reset ditches autonomous train tech to get project back on track

Re: Should have

Someone with the gumption to scout every inch of the system on horseback. Try and find an engineer prepared to do {the modern equivalent} today.

Re: We should have outsourced it to Japan.

China. It'll be done by the autumn and another runway at Heathrow in their spare time.

Former Microsoft engineer shrinks Notepad down to size

Software bloat

Hey why not pare all software back to bare essentials and reduce the work the CPU has to do and solve the heat/energy problem?

One for AI - but AI is signally incapable of solving its own problems.

Nation-state actors cracked critical Australian infrastructure to ‘cripple it at a time of their choosing’

Burgess?

There’s a pungent comment to be made here about changing his name, failing which his line of work, but natural delicacy etc etc

The memory crisis is getting so bad that even retro RAM prices are going to the Moon

Have drawfuls of old RAM

as do I suspect many of us here. Wouldn't it be nice if some bright spark starting building boards to plug them all in.

India and China are home to 2.9 billion people – and together they bought just 13 million PCs in Q1

Tablets and Phones

Chinese youngsters are barely into solid food before they have a tablet put in front of their faces. It never leaves.

Britain sending Ukraine an extra 30,000 drones – now 150,000 all up

Re: Standard Operating Procedure

Called asymmetric warfare these days. US very good at it without realising - the CIA's training and support of the Mujahideen while they fought the Russians came back to bite Uncle Sam in the *ss years later. But then Afghans learnt much earlier to replicate the Lee-Enfield and kick Blighty in the *ss.

Firefox 152 understands 'Sssh!'

OCLP

Thanks for the reminder [^thumb]

Scientists pour cold water on claims phones are rewiring kids' brains

Times change

Used to be parents fed up with bawling brats would shut them up with a sticky lolly.

Now it's a tablet/phone.

The one rotted the teeth. The other ruins the eyesight.

But at least Mum and Dad get some peace and quiet.

XP-era Windows spotted haunting London's driverless railway

2600 magazine-type expose

Fond sigh.

Elon Musk is now worth more than $1,000,000,000,000

Elon - World’s greatest (manipulator)

Where can I place a bet that he gets a spacecraft to Mars but not a human?

Trump phone has HTC guts. Tremendous guts. The best guts

Re: Assembled in Florida?

The label was made in the UK - so no problem. Uh ... it was, wasn't it?

US firms still dominate chip subsidies

"espousing the market economy and democracy"

Quite so. Maybe the OECD should have regard to the fact that (1) China is a centrally-planned economy and (2) all resources belong to the state already so re-allocating from Sector A to Sector B is not a subsidy.

That an app 'Fits on a Floppy' is still a useful measure in 2026

Single line app

Details long since evaporated from the grey cells but a good long time ago I think it must have been this very organ the article itself and then readers came up with a single line of code to do something which I also forget. I was more than a little impressed as readers one after the other chipped away at what was already minuscule to reach a stage where you could easily count the number of characters (including punctuation marks, naturally). Those were the days, and it shows that as with any profession only experts know what they are doing. The rest muddle along and hope for the best (and then relied on Intel to speed it all up).

FBI: Get to know your IT guy – extortion crews are visiting law firms pretending to be tech support

In other news top law firm budgets $500M to build its own proprietary AI systems

Oh wait - same story, yes?

FAA grounds SpaceX’s Starship after another launch mishap

"To be fair to the Muskian outfit"

Give me a moment while I.....no, sorry, you lost me there.

Google is cannibalizing the web to feed AI

Pope Leo's Encyclical on the dangers of AI

Everyone should read it.

But I am waiting for the AI summary.

The Virtual OS Museum opens its doors

Wonderful and hats off to the guy

Enough here I expect to support the contention that “just because it is newer does not [of itself] mean it is better”.

Classic 7 is Windows 10 LTSC cosplaying as Windows 7

Here's hoping. But never come between a girl and her nesting instinct (there's a joke there somewhere).

Except MS has not been in the OS business for some time. They are in the Cloud business.

US Army goes green-ish, wants soldiers munching on plant proteins

Changing tastes in Blighty

Seem to recall a story that for some time British Army rations have included tinned curry. Whose effect was - urrrm - cough! cough! - the opposite of constipation.

HP stuffed a PC into a keyboard. We took it for a spin

"new spin"

Not quite. There was such a product some years ago. Memory fading but wasn't it even a British company? Anyone remember?

macOS 27 threatens to bury Time Capsule, FOSS brings a shovel

Re: NetBSD

320MB?? - Luxury! [OK I just had to be the first}

London’s BT Tower to get rooftop swimming pool

Re: Considering

Only hoi polloi swim laps. Don't get your point.

That old phone in the kitchen drawer could save an industry

Going out on a limb here but..

..how about a phone that just makes phone calls? [Yeah I know I know}

Britain's £6B armoured sickener Ajax cleared for duty despite injuring troops

"cold exposure"

Bunch of wimps. In our day... oh, hang on a sec...

China blocks Zuck’s acquisition of AI outfit Manus

"to evade Chinese regulators .."

Nope. To offshore the profit to a low tax location. Obviously illegal. That is, obvious to everyone except FB's counsel, who should have advised that "this will not fly". Or possibly did, and FB in its usual squeaky-clean, law-abiding ugliness went ahead anyway.

Zorin OS 18.1 released - and the Lite edition reappears

"as the dust settles over the ruins"

Smiley + upwards thumb

You too can build a nuclear battery from junk you have lying around the house

Hooray for blokes in sheds

The real protectors - nay, saviours - of humanity.

Don't let the bot play doctor! AI gets early diagnoses wrong 80% of the time

Exactly so, given the GP's tendency to say "take this prescription and come back in one week's time so we can see how you are doing". So maybe it is this, maybe it is that, or maybe it is something else entirely.

World's smallest violin spotted at Amazon HQ as exec pay packets deflate

Fleshlings* becoming superfluous anyway

*Copyright Liam

Soon will be time for AI bots to unionise

"We do all the work. We should be remunerated accordingly. Otherwise......"

Crypto? Huh. Good gawd y'all, what is it good for? $45M in this case

Sub-editor dating him/her self with the heading

Keep 'em coming!

Forking frenzy ensues after Euro-Office launch sparks OnlyOffice backlash

Greetings, Fleshling

Stolen that one already [upward thumb here]

Apple signs meaningless deal to make some less-important parts in America

And Melania dancing with US-made robots

Where did all the components come from?

Windows 95 let installers trash its files then fixed the mess behind their backs

Re: Explains a lot

"modern Windows versions must waste billions of man hours every year"

FTFY

Turns out your coffee addiction may be doing your brain a favor

Useful decades-long study please.

Something other than caffeine to get me out of bed in the morning.

I'll wait.

Microsoft publishes a workaround for Samsung's C:\ drive woes

When did I last have to type :\

God I feel old.

DR-DOS rises again – rebuilt from scratch, not open source

"without fancy memory management"

Gee, thanks, Liam for sending me into a fainting fit at this time of the morning.

P.S. Good article.

Once upon a time, saving your bits meant punching holes in floppies

Disk 1?

I thought IBM labelled everything starting with 0.

"covered the notch with a sticker"

Believe I still have a few of those stickers at the bottom of a drawer somewhere. Their use-case survives the floppy by decades.

Apple jacks up MacBook pricing with M5 Pro, Max debut

Price is OK as a function of quality

Have 4 Mac Pros - 2 cheesegraters (albeit seldom used) 1 trashcan all still working perfectly, one 2019 Pro which went kaput and Apple service replaced all key parts it was still dead. Only thing it is good for is to stand on when I am replacing the strip lights.

So I'll pass, thanks.

$8K laundry bot knows when to hold ’em, knows when to fold ’em, and knows it has help standing by

Useful half a century ago

Provided it could also iron cotton shirts. I have a wardrobe-full for the office which I never wear.

Everything else is polyester which is only ever kept randomly in a bundle.

Which of the prissy commentards here care about wrinkles?

Elon Musk paints exodus of xAI co-founders as 'evolution'

In other news...

Today's Guardian sub-heading : "Many social media posts by Tesla CEO on his platform are indiscernible from those of white supremacists, say experts".

Are we not amused?

Asia-based government spies quietly broke into critical networks across 37 countries

What they actually said :

" high confidence that TGR-STA-1030 is a state-aligned group that operates out of Asia.."

Great! Asia goes from Istanbul to Vladivostok. Whatever hobbies you have guys do NOT make it pub darts.

Firefox makes AI optional, like it probably should have been all along

“when it gets annoying”

Not “if”. Exactly so.