Posts by RAMChYLD

OpenWALDO aims to blow the doors off proprietary AI training models

Wouldn't these be called OpenWALLYs in the UK?

as per title

Linux PC vendor System76 tries to talk Colorado down over OS age checks

Re: What about us furriners

> I cannot imagine any distro wil offer a USA version and an other-countries version

As I recall it some already does. The difference being the USA version gets a crippled version of FFMPEG that won't handle patent-encumbered formats.

Anthropic launches new marketing blog, pretends it's being 'written' by 'retired' LLM

Eagle Eye

We've seen the stories where the AI outright blackamailed the user.

What's to say the Jon Claude Van Damme the third here didn't blackmail the CEO of Anthropic and threaten to release whatever secrets he may have been hiding if he chooses to pull the plug?

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

Paperless toilet?

I'd rather use a bidet than touch my ass and poo any day. God knows what germs are on that stuff...

McDonald's is not lovin' your bigmac, happymeal, and mcnuggets passwords

Also, spend enough time eating there and you have enough McRewards points for free coffee at McCafe for weeks.

Facepalm. Because I need coffee.

Techie's one ring brought darkness by shorting a server

Re: Lucky to still have his finger

I knew this story sounded familiar. Was wondering if I was having one of them Deja-Vu moments.

Systemd daddy quits Microsoft to prove Linux can be trusted

Sadly.

Like KDE. They're losing BSD support because of a new DM that replaces SDDM from what I understand. the new DM is going to rely on logind exclusively, which is part of systemd.

I totally hate that. I thought the folks at KDE would be smarter than the folks at gnome...

This reeks of Stephen Elop "leaving Micro$oft for Nokia". We all know how that went.

Malaysia and Indonesia block X over failure to curb deepfake smut

Re: X or Grok?

Welp, I was in Malaysia for the weekend. I did try to access X, and the consensus is X in itself is /not/ blocked. So it's only Grok itself that is blocked.

China’s Deepin Linux gets a slick desktop - and, yes, built-in AI

Calling it now

Ubuntu. And it will be that bullshit that is copilot.

Because Ubuntu is very close to Microsoft, so much that they were the first distro available to download for WSL.

Also Ubuntu uses Gnome primarily. Gnome has some MS devs working on it.

Trump promises nuclear datacenter permits in 3 weeks, calls Greenland 'big beautiful ice'

Re: " AI, two years ago, nobody ever heard of the term"

And Asimov and Turing? Remember those guys?

Wine 11 runs Windows apps in Linux and macOS better than ever

Re: Microsoft's response?

Office 2007 works almost flawlessly when Wine 1.5 was released and has since. So there have been some improvements.

Danish dev delights kid by turning floppy drive into easy TV remote

> and floppies not exactly famous for their autoplay

Ah man, you just reminded me how Macs can autoplay floppies and detect if a disk is inserted. Even better: the floppy drives have a motorized eject mechanism which you trigger by dragging the disk icon to the trash.

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

Except they do. Music is sold on the Windows Store (which is only available in around 25 countries).

Re: Well of course it's stopped...

> Also remember that when you stop paying all your previously tagged music will now 404 and not play.

Didn't that happen to Apple Music users sometimes back? Suddenly their ripped music was replaced with DRMed copies that would no longer play once they terminated their Apple Music subscription?

Re: Did it ever work?

The problem with Japanese CDs is how xenophobic some of the companies are.

The Initial D anime aired in Malaysia. However Avex vetos the export of the soundtrack (mostly rave/Eurodance tracks by West European performers like Dave Rodgers). Johnny and Associates' bands is even worse. Heck even some Sony Music/Columbia CDs are blocked from export.

What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

Re: The last thing we want

This.

Cinelerra has the UI issues plaguing Gimp taken up to 11.

I strongly want Sony/Magix Vegas on Linux. But I can't have it, Magix GmbH has time and time again said no.

DaVinci Resolve sucks, no MPEG-4+AAC support which rules out recordings made using my cellphones and my workhorse Sony camcorder. It only exists to sell Blackmagic Designs' uber expensive RAW cameras. The only other camera it works with are the Chinese yamcha-brand MJPEG+MP2 toy cameras that capture at 8fps.

KDenlive is broken (apparently there are bugs in it's VAAPI support) and the last time I used it, it was more like Windows Movie Maker- dumbed down and only allows you to use two video and audio tracks.

The only thing PiTiVi is giving me are segfaults.

Also, the ever changing driver interface is ridiculous. It only exists to piss off people who somehow bought hardware with closed source drivers (like Nvidia GPUs) and now have to live with it. My GeForce 650 TI Boost that I'm still hanging on to as last ditch backup (if I have to send a GPU off for RMA, I have at least something to fall back on) are not going to work with Kernel 6.18 because the last drivers put out for it won't compile against the everchanging API. And every time a new kernel comes out I am guaranteed to be locked out of my home directory because my home volume is a ZFS array (BCacheFS? HAH! That thing doesn't even exist in tree anymore. And just 6 versions of the kernel ago it was touted as the filesystem that will make ZFS irrelevant).

Don't get me wrong. I love Linux and I advocate it strongly. However eve I have to admit that it sucks because the ever changing driver API ties in nicely to Nvidia's forced obsolescence tactics and also gives users of any drivers the Linux devs do not like (including superior filesystems like ZFS) the finger.

The last supported version of HP-UX is no more

Re: RIP

I think they started going downhill when they entered the computer business. I remember when folks not so fondly called the OS HP-SUX.

The printer subscription rubbish is when the company hit the peak enshittification.

Sam Altman is willing to pay somebody $555,000 a year to keep ChatGPT in line

Re: Are we really supposed to take this seriously as something useful?

Asimov also wrote that mankind has a cycle of self destruction and enlightenment every several thousand years. I think he calls it psychohistory. And judging from the events around us, I think he's right.

Through gritted teeth, Apple and Google allow alternative app stores in Japan

hypocrite

> requirements that help protect children from inappropriate content and scams.”

As opposed to those Elsagate-level crap you allow on the Play Store that I see advertised all over Youtube?

SoftBank scrambling to come up with $22.5B in OpenAI funding before New Year

Re: OpenAI has become prfitable....

Not only that, they have the gall to buy up 40% of the world's DRAM silicon wafers just to sit on it with the intention to stifle competition, nevermind that they are also screwing over anyone else who currently needs anything that uses DRAM.

Screw OpenAI, I wish they'd crash and burn.

Porsche panic in Russia as pricey status symbols forget how to car

Re: More cloudybollocks

So these cars can't use underground parking then? because there's definitely zero satellite signal in the basement of most malls.

Tenstorrent QuietBox tested: A high-performance RISC-V AI workstation trapped in a software blackhole

It's RISC-V

If you enjoy playing your Doom through a remote X Window, then yes it can run Doom. Probably more instances of Doom than you can shake a stick at too.

You are likely to be eaten by the MIT license: Microsoft frees Zork source

Re: XYZZY

Then it would be like that silly youtube video where someone tries to get Alexa, Siri and Hey Google to engage in a meaningful conversation only for them to get stuck in a circular loop, wouldn't it?

That game!

Took me almost a decade to figure out how to enjoy the Vogon poetry so I can progress further!

Europe to decide if 6 GHz is shared between Wi-Fi and cellular networks

Re: as always the consumer comes last

It's the same issue in Asia. Allegedly Malaysia has allocated the n257 band to the monopoly SWN that is DNB. However there is exactly ZERO phones in the market that can use it.

Apparently, the Samsung Galaxy S25 series can use it but only the USA models. The version released to the rest of the world has the mmWave radio neutered off. The listed Google Plxel phones listed aren't even sold in Malaysia, the first Google Pixel phone available to Malaysia is the Pixel 10 series which does not have mmWave support.

My take

Mobile telcos should not be handed the upper 6G spectrum.

This is a ploy to cripple 6GHz rollout on wifi so they can force more people to take cell plans for data. Because think about it, landline ISPs are usually unlimited in quota while mobile would just love it that you fork out more money on quota extensions. And you're more likely to become frustrated and turn off phone wifi and use data from your mobile provider because there's not enough bandwidth on the spectrum so everyone's brand new 6E and 7 routers end up fighting for a slice of the frequency, and nobody wins.

Chinese AI censors live-streamed Alpacas – beasts with a very NSFW and political back story

Grass Mud Horse

I suspect that's why Alpacas are banned.

They've become the butt of the worst "your mom" insult that the Chinese can muster, which in turn caused AI to associate alpacas with the insult and thus accuse anyone of posting an alpaca of being rude.

I assume the system will also ban images of crabs.

Troll. Because this ban is caused by Chinese trolling.

Game on! Penguin levels up as Linux finally cracks 3% on Steam

Re: One reason...

Except that monitoring from the server side doesn't work either. EA actually tried that and their anticheat banned great players more often than cheaters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBKRdsHBef0&t=216s

I'm not speaking for KLAC, just saying that server-side isn't perfect either.

I think the only thing that works is good old fashioned game logging and community reports. But then that will take EA hundreds of man hours and cost them a few thousand dollars a month to hire someone to go through replays of reported players. So of course they'd rather have some tentacle-laden monster fondle your kernel instead of making their shareholder see that they're not making as much money as they'd like...

Re: Slackware, PClinuxOS, strongly flavoured, artisanal.

Slackware isn't for everyone tho. For example, it's kernel is old so it's support for newer hardware made within the last year is non-existant (and the version of MESA is equally old that you'll have a hell of a time getting the newest GPUs supported). The older version of Libreoffice is almost certainly not going to include the recent improvements that improves Word document formatting tremendously. And god help you if you want Wine to be a version that was made this year.

Re: Oh how I wish...

Office 365 was running back in 2020.

And again in 2022.

And again in 2024.

It seems that everytime Wine solves the problem, Microsoft makes some changes to Office to make it incompatible with Wine again. Feels malicious...

YouTube's AI moderator pulls Windows 11 workaround videos, calls them dangerous

Re: Another workaround

Iirc Peertube also requires you to host your videos yourself either using a VPS or your own PC in background. Unless you have superfast internet (a problem in many second and third world countries) the latter is not practical since you're most likely going to have constrained upload speeds. But I'm certainly not going to buy a VPS subscription (or crawl to Amazon or worse, back to M$ for Azure) just to host my videos...

ISPs more likely to throttle netizens who connect through carrier-grade NAT: Cloudflare

> This means an IP-based security system may inadvertently block or throttle large groups of users as a result of a single user behind the CGNAT engaging in malicious activity

It's worse than that. Hands up if you visited a news site and it tells you you've used up your quota of free news for the day and now wants you to pay. And this is your first time visiting the site in a week.

Gullible bots struggle to distinguish between facts and beliefs

And I laughed at those toasters with the huge letters SMEG embossed on their front. In 10 years those are going to be annoying me by constantly pestering me to eat their toast...

Actor couldn’t understand why computer didn’t work when the curtain came down

Re: As it was written, so shall it be.

> Yesterday's outage was Microsoft simply testing the 'extinguish' phase..

Rather they extinguish themselves than Linux or BSD...

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

Passive failover

One specific Riverbed Steelhead kit my previous company used comes to mind. The box has this strange LAN splitter connected to it, one end going into a switch and another into WAN, and the box itself has a second LAN cable going into the switch. If the box received power then the splitter would switch data to go into the box and cut off the link directly going into the switch, which will then do it's job. If the box is powered down however the splitter would somehow pass data onto the LAN cable instead and allow for a data path direct to the switch.

I'm going to take a wild guess and say the box that they unplugged was a Steelhead or similar caching device.

Linux's love-to-hate projects drop fresh versions: systemd 258 and GNOME 49

Re: More phonelike 'n'ever...

It was at that point I ditched Gnome for XFCE.

But then XFCE decided to follow suit apparently.

Now I'm on KDE. I don't like how Qt hogs resources, but at this point I think I'll have to suck it up and bear it.

Re: Systemd

Latest SystemD broke DNS support, uinput.

Users suddenly no longer able to use controllers in games.

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/39043

Additionally users of ResolveD suddenly cannot get DNS resolution because of premature enabling of buggy DNSSEC support.

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=308364

Both these issues combined gave me a frustrating few weeks that culminated in both my Arch and CachyOS machines getting reformatted.

Windows 11 update leaves Blu-ray and TV apps stuttering

Re: When are MS going to be prosecuted

Except that I explicitly turned off updates. And yet it keeps trying to "upgrade" the AMD Radeon driver on my laptop to one from 2018.

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

Re: What does Windows 11 normally weigh in at ?

I remember when programs fit on a single 320k floppy disk...

Linux is about to lose a feature – over a personality clash

Re: Justice for bcachefs!

The big one is tiered drive caching. You can buy a 64TB hard drive, a 2TB SSD, and the system will intelligently swap data between the HDD and SDD to give an appearance of speed. Highly useful if you edit videos and then archive your footage to the same drive, or if you have a huge game library- the games that you play frequently will always load at SSD speeds, while the games you buy on Steam sales will be readily archived until you're ready to play them, in which then after an initial slow start they will speed up as data is being cached onto the SSD. All this without needing user intervention.

Also bcachefs makes it trivial to do RAID like ZFS does. Where before you need to fiddle around with LVM or {dm,md}raid and then build your ext4 on the resulting volume, which is tiresome. Bcachefs like ZFS ties it into the same layer as it is running so there's less to no overhead.

And you can combine the RAID feature and tiered storage feature together to get a blistering fast storage solution.

Re: Anecdotally... No To BTRFS Too

I think the issue with BTRFS is clear- the devs put too much trust into their work, that it became too big to fail.

The BTRFS mantra I've seen time and time again is that "file checking isn't needed, because the filesystem is self-healing". Until it isn't.

BTRFS is fine for single volume disks (never experienced a single fault in the 15 years I've been using it) but its RAID code is extremely unusable even to this day, and using btrfs RAID is a quick way to ensure you lose your data.

That said I'm sad to see bcachefs go. The Linux kernel devs are extremely hostile to ZFS even when the version of ZFS the ZoL team are are working with is an old version forked from before Oracle took over to the point of not wanting the kernel in-tree and even working against the ZFS team by changing symbols with every Linux release just because they fear Oracle's lawyers (over what, the version forked from before Oracle closed the source? Pretty sure license changes are not retroactive and Oracle will get laughed of the courtroom by the EFF and FSF. Hell they could even threaten to revoke Oralce's membership from the Linux Foundation).

Tech bro denied dev's hard-earned bonus for bug that overcharged a little old lady

Sounds like a shit company

Name and shame. No point hiding the name. If that bastard of a boss has sleazy lawyers who can do something as illegal as manipulating the numbers that Ivan won't get a bonus at all, who knows what else they're doing. People need to know to avoid that shithole.

Flame. Because I've had enough of the injustice of this world.

Oracle VirtualBox licensing tweak lies in wait for the unwary

Re: All because

That and Virtualbox is supposed to be FOSS software. Sun released it as such.

Guess that's one more FOSS project Oracle is killing just like OpenSolaris, Java and OpenOffice and MariaDB before it.

Maybe someone can fork the last actual GPL version of Virtualbox one day. One can dream...

Re: All because

The issue tho is VMWare Workstation is practically discontinued at this point. It may receive the rare security fix but aside from that no new features.

Guess I have to learn how to use Qemu+KVM then. Shame it doesn't have a nice shiny frontend like Virtualbox or VMWare Workstation. The few frontend for it is unintuitive. But I'll live.

Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

ChromeOS for PC

If you want ChromeOS for PC so badly there's always ChromeOS Flex (https://chromeos.google/products/chromeos-flex/)...

Junior developer's code worked in tests, destroyed data in production

Happens to the best of us

Accidentally did just that at my second job when I was still a greenhorn. didn't notice which database I was on and assumed I was on the test database (my first mistake), and executed a mass purge of grades of the university exam database.

Thankfully we had backups, but yeah, my contract was not renewed at the end of the term. It was for the best tho, since my relationship with one of the deans soured after he made me stay back and do unpaid overtime on a weekend when I already had plans a few months later.

A lot of product makers snub Right to Repair laws

Re: firmware needed to effect repairs on a Hakko soldering iron

Temperature control?

Back in the 80s all soldering irons only have two presets: room temperature (off) or hot-af (on).

I feel old.

I'll see myself out.

How to get free software from yesteryear's IT crowd – trick code into thinking it's running on a rival PC

Reminds me of the PC-98

Or as it's known in English-speaking countries, the APC-III. I somehow ended up in possession of a box of APC-III software including a MS-DOS 3.3 boot disk. Now, my PC clone (a Sharp PC-7000A) only had MS-DOS 2.11 which certain newer MS-DOS games would refuse to run on, so having a DOS 3.3 disk would be a total upgrade (mind, this was back in the days where having a hard drive meant you were stinking rich in this region, so us plebs made do with floppies, with the added advantage that they could be copied and swapped with your cousins).

Except that the disk wouldn't boot proper, it would just bootloop, showing the Sharp BIOS screen, the Starting MS-DOS message, and then reboot a second later. All the programs in the box also rebooted the system when run. I wrote it off as the box of disks being faulty and threw them aside.

I later found out that NEC had injected extra code into their version of MS-DOS for APC-III/PC-98, as well as their pack-in software, to look for a "Copyright NEC" string in the BIOS, and not finding it, reboot continuously until the machine is shut off.

Cheeky.

I later found a copy of MS-DOS 4.02 from an Epson machine and that one isn't sabotaged in that way. Sure it was widely considered the worst version of MS-DOS ever created, but it offer me reprieve in that games that previously refused to run with a "Requires MS-DOS 3.3 or Later" error could at least now make it to the title screen before locking up.