Posts by druck

Curse of AI to push up PC prices as memory and CPU shortages bite

Re: Anyone asked MS about this?

Ditch Windows 11 for Linux and you can flog half your memory for almost as much now as you paid for the whole computer.

n8n security woes roll on as new critical flaws bypass December fix

Disrupt the disruptor

Multiple newly disclosed bugs in the popular workflow automation tool n8n could allow attackers to hijack servers, steal credentials, and quietly disrupt AI-driven business processes.

And the problem is?

Satya Nadella decides Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar

Re: QA at MicroSlop

In other news the Taliban appoint a minister of women's rights.

It's bubble or nothing for Google as search giant looks to plow ~$180B into datacenters this year

Re: $180B for "generative AI"

Slop-boarded.

Nitrogen ransomware is so broken even the crooks can't unlock your files

Re: Criminalize paying ransom

The only way to stop it is to outlaw the only method of payment which makes it viable - crypto curremcies.

Azure outages ripple across multiple dependent Microsoft services

Re: Circular Failure

I don't think anyone knows how long a restart of these distributed systems would take after a total failure (e.g high-altitude nuclear detonations, Carrington event).

Or in the case of Azure; a door mouse farting.

DRAM prices expected to double in Q1 as AI ambitions push memory fabs to their limit

Re: Ugh

Ditch the Microslop and 8GB is fine for Linux.

Snowflake bets $200M that OpenAI makes databases more chatty

Re: Is it worth it?

FOMO

Microsoft's 'atypical' emergency Windows patches are becoming awfully typical

Re: " the [..] administrators' already shaky faith in the company"

WSL - some of the niceties of Linux, but still with all the pain of maintaining Windows.

Yes, you can build an AI agent – here's how, using LangFlow

AI;dr

as above

How agentic AI can strain modern memory hierarchies

Re: "memory as physically close to the GPU as possible"

The difference is, in all those creatures the brain(s) are providing a useful function.

QED; I can't remember the last time I was bullshitted by a cephalopod.

Gartner questions whether Salesforce AI buffet will stay all-you-can-eat forever

Simples

With consumption models, because of the inconsistency from vendor to vendor, many buyers are really struggling to understand how they can control costs."

Easy, just don't use AI.

Vibe coding may be hazardous to open source

That's not how post bubble recessions work.

Those who have way too much money will have a bit less way too much, the rest of us feel the effects far more in job losses and huge amounts wiped off pension funds.

AI has to die though.

Oracle AI sailed the world on Royal Navy flagship via cloud-at-the-edge kit

They all go to the Isle of Wight.

ESA puts ExoMars lander through its paces with eye on 2028 launch

Insectoids know best

Why only 4 legs which can fall over if one fails, when 6 give extra stability?

The recent commercial moon landings demonstrate this only too well.

MX Linux 25.1 brings back switchable init systems

Systemd is the only init system which has it's own incompatible with everything binary file logging system. All others have no interest in being anything other than an init system, so readable by anything textual logs are produced by rsyslog or whatever alternative you may be using.

Luckily those who use systemd for whatever reason, are still permitted by Poettering to setup journald to pipe everything through rsyslog to get textual logs too.

Royal Navy's helicopter drone makes its first autonomous flight

Re: Unmanned take-off/landing on ships?

If you want a successful landing, you don't react to the ship's movement, you anticipate it.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: "a large US-based aircraft company"

It wouldn't as it was available as an optional safety item at additional cost - safety items shouldn't be optional.

Flipping one bit leaves AMD CPUs open to VM vuln

Re: Only with SMT: Most important info at the end of the article...

On a 24-core Threadripper, with 128GB of memory (which never gets fully used, so we *know* this is purely compute-bound)

You do not know it is compute bound because it doesn't use all the the available memory. It may be memory bound if it is using all the cache/memory bandwidth, and this is precisely where SMT is beneficial as it can switch to the other thread during cache misses. If it was truly compute bound SMT would reduce instruction throughput slightly.

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

Roblox?

Asking for my 12 year old; does Roblox work?

He's very annoyed that when Windows 10 went out of support on his old laptop I wiped it and put Linux on. The only thing that stopped a major riot was the wife getting a free Chromebook with her new phone which runs Roblox. He's softened up a bit on Linux after using it for the Pi Hut Maker Advent Calendar, but needs a bit more persuasion to see the light.

Dell wants £10m+ from VMware if Tesco case goes against it

The whole point of the bag for life nonsense was they would give you a new bag when the old one broke.

'Imagination the limit': DeadLock ransomware gang using smart contracts to hide their work

I don't think ransomware extortion is a much different use case to cryptocurrency ponzi schemes - nothing bonefide, it's all a scam.

Buy servers now or cry later: DRAM price spike threatens infrastructure budgets

Re: Why would you have to buy the servers now?

Except they'll bring out DDR6 servers, making your stock of DDR5 RAM worthless.

Don’t bother with the retailer’s website, says Google: Gemini can shop for you

Not soon enough!

How CP/M-86's delay handed Microsoft the keys to the kingdom

Re: CP/M wasn't late

And we've been paying for that decision ever since.

Bank of England's Oracle cloud migration bill triples as project grinds on

Re: Sounds complicated /s

ai;dr

Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

You could be describing just about every defence company.

Ransomware attacks kept climbing in 2025 as gangs refused to stay dead

Re: Solution is to make it illegal to pay ransomeware

The best solution is to ban the only means of payment which makes the ransomware business model (and other e-crime) viable - crypto currencies.

Garmin autopilot lands small aircraft without human assistance

Re: Nice job

I'd certainly agree with that, getting a pilots licence does make you realise not just how little training there is for a driving licence, but that once obtained there are no regular checks that the skills and good practices are being maintained, even well in to old age.

However, my original point stands, the only way in which flying is easier than driving, is the likelihood of turning complacency and inattention into a fatal accident.

Re: Water landings are incredibly dangerous

A lot will depend on the aircraft. A light weight glider with a very low landing speed, may be arrested by the flexible tree tops and then drop relatively gently through the branches. On the other hand a heavier powered aircraft will cut through the treetops until it hits a solid tree trunk, and the branches wont break the fall as much. Gliders also perform unpowered landings every time, so they have a lot more confidence in that situation than us powered folk for who it is something we train extensively for, but hope we never have to do.

Re: Nice job

If the truth be known its actually a lot easier to fly a plane than to drive a car.

When you've got both licences you can come back and explain why aviation authorities have all these pointless training requirements.

AOSP on a diet plan as Google halves Android code drops

Re: Other options

AI;dr.

AMD threatens to go medieval on Nvidia with Epyc and Instinct: What we know so far

Re: 1000x Performance Uplift

The remaining 1.3% being AI snake oil salesmen.

IBM's AI agent Bob easily duped to run malware, researchers show

AI;du

Artificial lntlligence ; don't use

It's the only way to stay safe.

SanDisk heals WD Black and Blues, rebrands beloved client SSDs

They were 5400rpm drives with very sort inactivity times before spinning down, or at least were last time I had one, quite a few years ago.

ESA calls cops as crims lift off 500 GB of files, say security black hole still open

IT was outsourced to Tata's own TCS, a cheap bolt on the front gate would be like Fort Knox by comparison.

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

Re: "I am sorry, but I couldn't help myself. It's my character."

Everywhere you look there are fuckwits trying to enshittify every single piece of software, from this madness in Gnome, Wayland not supporting vital X11 features, to idiots porting command line tools to Rust and silently ignoring options they couldn't be bothered implementing.

Qualcomm is determined to cut a slice out of Intel's PC pie with latest Snapdragon chips

Exactly, it would be much better for them to offer an ARM powered Linux alternative to MACs rather than being the Windows devices that nobody wants.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella becomes AI influencer, asks us all to move beyond slop

Re: logical extension of sn ramblings

and dangerous.

Finally - a terminal solution to the browser wars

Sixels reorientated

Back in the days of Teletext (videotext) sixels were 3 pixels high and two wide in each character, but then with 40x25 character screens each character was more square.

Safe CEO: AI is an assistant, not a replacement

In terms of software engineers, its very hard to argue that AI hasn't outpaced its entire cohort of junior devs in terms of quality of output.

Only if you think a junior dev is one that is complete shit and incapable of learning anything.

Coming Wi-Fi 8 will bring reliability rather than greater speed

Don't just walk away

One such scenario Cordeiro suggests is one where a user is in an online meeting on their laptop, and gets up and walks away holding their phone.

"Automatically, the laptop and the phone will realize that they are moving away from each other, and this Teams session could transfer to my phone. I don't have to do anything automatically. I move away, the Teams session goes to my phone, and then when I come back to my PC, the Teams session automatically transfers back to the PC," he explained.

You are suffering from an upset stomach, quickly excuse yourself from the Teams meeting and make a dash to the toilet. On returning relief turns to horror as you find everyone in the meeting heard your bottom explosion when Teams transparently transferred to your phone and broadcast the entire experience (thankfully with the exception of the smell).

You don't need Linux to run free and open source software

Re: Amazingly title happens to be correct;

That is true, but the posting times of GNU Enjoyer indicate UTC+3 where as Eric 9001 is more likely to be in New Zealand or Eastern Australia time zones.

Waymo pings updates to San Francisco fleet to prevent power outage chaos 2.0

Re: Downed Power Cables

It's due to the propensity of earthquakes in both cases.

Windows is testing a new, wider Run dialog box. Here’s how to try it

Re: Typical Lipstick on a pig

Glitter on a turd would be far more appropriate.

Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

Re: Lovely idea - no chance of it ever happening

Don't mention Rust, on my ASUS laptop a couple of thousand line utility to control fan speed and keyboard LEDs under Linux sucks in a GB of Rust crates, and generates another 2.1 bloody GB of intermediate crap when it compiles, can you image doing that on a spinning rust disk?

Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical cord with Uncle Sam's big tech

Re: You can't have a sovereign digital cloud

Open source is the only viable possibility. Moving to a sovereign cloud based on any sort of proprietary stack has the risk of it being bought up by a US firm, where as an open source solutions can be moved to any of the vast number of European bit barns, which will soon be available at knock down prices once the AI bubble bursts.

Infinite Machine e-scooter is like the offspring of a Vespa and a Cybertruck

Re: Uncompromisingly ugly

The inspiration for this was having a scooter stolen, and obviously to make something no would ever want to.

UK prepares to wave goodbye to 3G telecoms as tri-hard tech retires

Re: End Of An Era?? Really??

I assume that supposed to be new contracts?

Cornish recycling drive sows confusion among Reg Standards Bureau

Density in Dunning-Kugerands.