Posts by PhilipN

Nano11 cuts Windows 11 down to size, grabbing just 2.8 GB of disk space

Re: Where is nano11?

https://nano11-dev.github.io/

tech zillionaire

Wasn't Elon muttering recently about using AI to write an OS? Or was he sleep-talking?

Would be interesting if only to find out how much bloat AI wrote into the OS.

Especially since Microserfs' outpourings are surely incorporated in the AI dataset, having a deleterious impact on...everything.

Home Office delays £816M English test contract despite market engagement

System to test the English skills?

Since most immigrants from South Asia speak better English than the average Sarf Landoner, Brummie, Geordie etc surely it would take only a fraction of the quoted amount to form them into a language-testing department.

UK government trial of M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost

Meeting Summaries are a critical human skill

How else are you going to do a 180 volte face and turn a loose consensus for Plan A into a firm commitment for Plan B?

And who wants to see recorded some of the crap which comes out of people's mouths in meetings?

AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending hunger for any and all content

Limited data set however hard you try

Storing up future problems for AI. How much of the planet and what we do every day is online?

No wonder searching has already become counter-productive.

Researcher who found McDonald's free-food hack turns her attention to Chinese restaurant robots

".. a Chinese robot manufacturer .."

Fluent in English?

DHS says it needs $100M worth of counter-drone tech to protect America

Re: L'etat, c'est moi

And you are not even allowed to use "people" anymore. No I am not joking. Its got to be men and/or women. Because the White House is scared stiff and paranoid about the hybrid possibilities of "people" even or especially in the context of pregnancy.

Classic Psion fan releases proof-of-concept language server for OPL

Fond sigh

MX too small for the desktop too big for the pocket but the best ever keyboard*

*which led through the usual hop skip jump thought process to the CyKey. Now nobody else here remembers those, do they?

New Yorkers will soon be able to yell 'I'm walkin here!' to Waymo robotaxis

Re: I'm Walkin Here!

Could someone remind me was that ^ Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy?

Google tries to trump iPhone launch with AI-powered Pixel 10 range

Re: Sooo

"you can't ... even easily root them" which means you can. So your point is?

Re: Sooo

Huawei phone is excellent except you are not Googled at every turn. Build quality and otherwise at least equal to Apple (I have both, high-end). Xenophobia? Maybe doesn't come from the same factory but certainly from the same country.

Pot calls kettle black as China dubs US 'surveillance empire' over chip tracking

Re: Huawei

For the DV'ers and others who do not know - CCDCOE is the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence

Take it up with NATO

Huawei

For the umpteenth time :

“There is, to date, no public evidence of serious technological vulnerabilities in specific Huawei or ZTE equipment.”

CCDCOE Paper, Tallinn 2019

SpaceX prepares itself for a tenth Starship flight test

Caught with chopsticks

Can someone explain - and I am prepared to be shot down in flames here - why it is deemed preferable to catch it, with the enormous expenditure of energy, compared with fishing out of the ocean.

The plan for Linux after Torvalds has a kernel of truth: There isn’t one

Gave me pause

And urgent check on the progress of GNU Hurd as a fallback. 35 years and counting.

Dodgy Huawei chips nearly sunk DeepSeek's next-gen R2 model

"more reputation at stake than..."

Matter of opinion

Breathe easy: Apple Watch can read your oxygen levels again

"wellness" – data entertainment

Thanks for that. It's called perspective.

Having used a plethora of different devices, sensors and apps I can smugly state I accept wholeheartedly an assessment which is upbeat and reject any which are downbeat.*

*Any subtle references to HRM entirely deliberate

Perplexity takes a shine to Chrome, offers Google $34.5 billion

“Comet, based on Chromium”

But which their website describes as “our new browser built from the ground up”.

Californian man so furious about forced Windows 11 upgrade that he's suing Microsoft

Re: If you REALLY want Windows 10, run Server 2019

BBC Home Service - you mean there's still a Two-Way Family Favourites, Listen With Mother and Music While You Work? Or was that the Light Programme?

Trump seeing green as he weighs deal to allow Nvidia Blackwell GPU sales to China

"repeat 5G and.."

No no that was a National Security policy decision not because PRC/Huawei had 5G and Uncle Sam did not. Get with the programme!

The dead need right to delete their data so they can't be AI-ified, lawyer says

Not everyone wants to be simulated after they're gone

I definitely do not want my simulation to have more fun than me.

Trump surprises with TSMC $300B investment claim

This week billions, next week trillions...

And why not?

Bye bye Taiwan is why.

UK's Ministry of Defence pins hopes on AI to stop the next massive email blunder

Saw the heading - thought I'd opened Private Eye by mistake

Or MAD Magazine or The Onion...

Tony Blair Institute: UK needs bit barns to lead in AI deployment, not training

Re: Credentials?

The report itself identifies (or rather doesn't) "multiple experts" (sic) but you can follow the link and find them. I was not too impressed but the only qualification for writing reports for an organisation such as this is to be able to write reports which at least seem plausible.

US lowers tariffs on major tech exporting nations - but buyers will still pay more

"manufacturing jobs continue to decline"

We are not talking here solely about manufacturing save possibly in its broadest possible sense. There are countless importers relying on overseas product who are up the creek without a paddle because - take a simple example such as a contract publisher or any publisher - he has to find a printer; who has to find a paper supplier; and machines; and machine operators; and ink suppliers; and sources for all sorts of other fancy gizmos stuck on books and magazines. Even if such an ecosystem existed, every single such local business would be selling their mothers into slavery to be first in the queue with local suppliers and sod the rest. The same applies across the board. Where are the guys sewing denim jeans together? And the dyeing and weaving factories to supply them? And the cotton pickers (many of whom are being kicked out)?

The fact also is in the meantime US importers are putting unbearable pressure on overseas suppliers (and hence indirectly their suppliers and hence etc) to eat part of the tariff cost. Once those suppliers reach the limit of their goodwill or their diminished cashflow they are just going to reject new US business. So - start again at the top ^

India gets its turn on the Trump tariff train: 25% levy to start Friday

He has to do it

That is, rake the coals regularly to keep the MAGA faithful entranced. But as evry fule no who has raked coals the fire goes out eventually anyway.

50 years have gone by since the UK's one – and only – homegrown foray into orbit

Re: What could have been

Having been reared in that era and a neighbour having been to Woomera (and a close relative to Christmas Island) seems like an era we [thought we] could do anything, Then the money ran out.

Google’s latest renewable energy deal is all gas bags and hot air

long-duration energy storage = trees

Plant more trees

Tom Lehrer: Satirist, mathematician, inventor of the Jello shot

Thank God for people like Tom L

Apart from anything else, if you think too hard about his comment on Kissinger and the Nobel Peace Prize, you will realise it has since then been downhill all the way.

Nice write-up - thanks, Liam*

*No, the other Liam

Trump promises he won't put his boot on Musk's neck

".. Donald Trump proclaimed .."

For the millionth meaningless time.

50 years ago, Gates and Allen made the deal that launched Microsoft

Re: Ominous

And Paul Allen wrote the boot code on the plane flying over

Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

Wherefore art thou Netscape

ChromeOS is what Netscape* woulda been shoulda been until - we all know the story - MS decided to kill it. We lost at least 10 more like 20 years.

*Alright I KNOW it was not an OS but it was a start. I mean, look at the thing it was mounted on. How difficult would it have been back then to build the bottom couple of layers for crissake?

Republican calls out Trump admin's decision to resume GPU sales to China

"war drum of "China, Enemy" started"

First I remember was an interview of Steve Bannon (pre-Trump I) when he vilified China following a talk with the Japanese when they villified China and he duly passed it on to Trump.

Re: You weave a web of disinformation and it becomes a problem for you

Do not understand the DV's. Congress basically throw out wild allegations all the time but haven't a clue what they are talking about. They may even be right, sometimes, but who knows?

Separate but related, and on which Congress will no doubt rely, is the broadside against Chinese hacking, full report available here :

https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2025-07/Chinas_Exploitation_of_Scam_Centers_in_Southeast_Asia.pdf

If you can find any actual authoritative evidence for the allegations you will win a prize.

China proves that open models are more effective than all the GPUs in the world

Re: Stop the Lies

Unless and until AI can say "The answer is a lemon" human evolution is stopped.

Coldplay kiss-cam flap proves we’re already our own surveillance state

And Martin should have kept his mouth shut

Preferably as from immediately after the release of "Yellow".

Google sues 25 alleged BadBox 2.0 botnet operators, all of whom are in China

"unnamed individuals" - Almost

The law suit is worth a look. Defendants are "DOES 1-25" further described as "individuals or entities..."

As regards their location Google say "Upon information and belief, Defendants are based in China" and admits they do "not know the true names and capacities of the Doe Defendants". Nor do they know how many there are. Associated domains are all over the place especially with Godaddy.

In other words they know nothing but reckon the Defendants - whoever wherever and however many there are - are subject to the jurisdiction of the District Court of the Southern District of New York.

Lets keep the lawyers busy and off the streets, eh?

Open, free, and completely ignored: The strange afterlife of Symbian

Re: Symbian vs S60

Good reminder. I had the Communicator “Brick” but in no time new apps and functions were S60 only. Fine product end-of-lifed far too soon.

Caught between China and Trump, Apple spends $500M on rare earth recycling

" multi-year, $500 million "

= cheque's in the mail or rather no it isn't.

British Perl guru Matt Trout dead at 42

The World needs its a**holes

At least sometimes (and I never even mentioned L**us).

And hats off to Liam for an unvarnished write-up.

Hegseth signs flying memo to expand military use of cheap drones in oddball video

"the biggest battlefield innovation in a generation"

Six months into the job and he worked that out all by himself? Ah, bless.

Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson backs plan to do a Jurassic Park on extinct birds

Edible?

And do we know what they ate to grow so big?

Airbus okays use of ‘Taxibot’ to tow planes to the runway

"make airports a little quieter"

? Still trying to get my head round that one.

Senate decides free rein for AI companies isn't such a good thing

Tennessee is the hub of the US country music world

and a persistent threat to creativity.

Mitch Kapor finally completes MIT master's degree after 45-year detour

Re: For all the condemnation

One of the kickstarters of the PC revolution.

And fond memories of Agenda, even after it had been wrangled and mangled by OBM for OS/2 for which they gave out a handy suite of apps.

FBI used bitcoin wallet records to peg notorious IntelBroker as UK national

"he US is seeking West's extradition"

Give us Anne Sacoolas and we'll give you Kai West.

Xlibre fork lights a fire under long-dormant X.org development

Re: "The Reg FOSS desk is nearing 60..."

In another ten 60 will no longer mean anything and then when you need to take a moment to work out how old you are the great thing is you realise it no longer matters.

China just two years behind USA on chip design, says White House tech Czar

Re: America, land of the free (market)

"Herald of Free Enterprise" or one like it offered for use in the Falklands War. Royal Navy's reaction "You have got to be joking" on the basis that complying by a whisker with civilian regulations fell way WAY short of military standards.

"“adept” at working around restrictions"

Does he mean resourceful and inventive at replicating existing processes and systems and developing new ones?

SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground

Re: 'Jigsaw Puzzle'

It's a mosaic. How hard can it be to throw it back together again?*

*Yeah I know I know