* Posts by druck

3700 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2007

Europe's exascale dreams inch closer as SiPearl finally tapes out Rhea1 chip

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Re: DiarRhea1

Designed using ARM’s US-developed Neoverse cores

Developed in Cambridge England, thank you.

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Re: Yawn

Someone certainly got out of bed on the wrong side this morning!

Thunderbird ESR is here: Mozilla's email client adds new functions

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I suspect it will be necessary as most applications idea of dark mode is white on various shades of mid grey, where as I prefer white on black. With DarkReader you can set the brightness to -20 and contrast to +20 to get that, or if you want white on dark grey try -10 and +10.

CoreWeave's $9B Core Scientific acquisition is a bid for more power

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Flame

AI farms and Crypto mining together

"You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy"

We're number 1! Windows 11 finally overtakes Windows 10

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WTF?

Re: It was me!

Why, oh why? What have those poor Raspberry Pi's ever done to you?

Atlassian migrated 4 million Postgres databases to shrink AWS bill

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Re: Infosys

What next, give them 1 day a week off?

Musk's antics and distractions are backfiring as Tesla's car business stalls

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Re: It's no suprise.

I think they are talking about engine size in a tank (SUV), as 10 litres is on the larger side for lawn mowers.

ChatGPT creates phisher’s paradise by recommending the wrong URLs for major companies

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Re: AI

FTFY: AI has no good purpose when security and privacy are required.

Cisco scores a perfect 10 - sadly for a critical flaw in its comms platform

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Re: Does Cisco use Ciso gear inside?

No, as UKCSG found, there is no evidence of intentional backdoors, as they are so full of unintentional holes anyone can get in anyway.

'Elevated' moisture reading ignored before Heathrow-closing conflagration, says NESO

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Unhappy

Re: LHR suing National Grid

Yes from my childhood it was an average of two days a week sitting in front of a non working TV with candles on top due to power cuts, and three days sitting in front of an empty TV table as it was away having the valves repaired. Even when it worked it was only black and white unlike everyone else's.

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Mushroom

Re: LHR suing National Grid

Because it is! Big numbers are just small ones, repeated.

Not when you are dealing with high voltage electricity it isn't.

Microsoft's on-prem Exchange and Skype for Business Server go subscription-only

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Re: "And prices are going up." ... "To support ongoing maintenance and updates"

And they didn't even try to justify the price rises by saying how much AI shit they have infested it with.

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Re: Subscription only

It would be very easy for them to roll it back. If it detects it hasn't been patched recently, all the patches fall off.

Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill bankrolls $85M Space Shuttle shuffle

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Unhappy

Who wants to bet that with DOGE's cutbacks to NOAA the barge sinks en route because they didn't see a it-can't-be-climate-change hurricane coming.

Don't pay for AI support failures, says Gradient Labs CEO

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Re: Frontline support is there to keep the customer from advancing

Pissing the user off with AI so much that they stop asking questions is counted as a resolution.

What dies the user do then? Ask an actual person they work with, thus wasting their time too, so how is that increased productivity looking?

Canada orders Chinese CCTV biz Hikvision to quit the country ASAP

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Re: Stopping using Hikvision products won't change anything

I have tried and it isn't very easy at all. As much as I love the Pi for all sorts of uses, it isn't a match for dedicated hardware in specific roles.

The Raspberry Pi camera is good for general media use, but isn't optimised for low light levels and low data rates for continuous transmission to recorders without transcoding, and doesn't have sound without additional hardware. Packaging it in waterproof case isn't easy, I've tried various cases with clear lids which went cloudy due to UV, eventually I switched to a dummy CCTV camera which just has enough room for a Pi Zero inside and the camera replacing the dummy lens. But don't leave it in the summer sun running motion detection and transcoding software as it will fry.

After a couple of years of experimenting with this I gave in and bought a Tapo C325WB, much better picture day and night, fully weather proof, better motion detection, local recording, and cost less than all the bits I'd bought for the Pi.

AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of the time, and a lot of them aren't AI at all

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Re: > "Open the pod bay doors, HAL," that's agentic AI too.

But it can't not know, it just puts together sequences of words which appear to be statistically related to the search terms. There is no intelligence to either know that an answer isn't possible or isn't likely to be correct.

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A friend and I managed to make a voice controlled robot buggy using a BBC Micro at University. It could recognise "forward", "reverse", "left", "right" and "stop" with good confidence. We were very pleased until demonstrating it to others when we found that due to the very low sampling quality due to lack of memory, just about any other 5 words would trigger one of the actions.

Before the megabit: A trip through vintage datacenter networking

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Re: Fond memories of networking in the days of X.25

Event when I was at UCL in the late 80s, it was still easier get things to/from other UK universities via a US intermediary using uucp, than FTP directly over Janet.

Uncle Sam wants you – to use memory-safe programming languages

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Re: Uncle Sam wants Microsoft to use memory-safe programming languages?

It wouldn't make Windows stable these days as I'm sure Co-pilot can generate garbage Rust just as easily as garbage C.

The network is indeed trying to become the computer

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Re: Would Moores Law be dead...

Yes liquid sodium is the way to go.

Starlink helps eight more nations pass 50 percent IPv6 adoption

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Back in the UK...

PlusNet on IPv6: "Oh, we tried that out once about 15 years ago, decided not to bother."

Kaseya CEO: Why AI adoption is below industry expectations

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Flame

Re: Agenthicc

LLMs are vastly inferior to sites such as Stack Overflow. They produce an output with no context and no providence. On the website you can see if the question matches what you are asking for, you can see the clarifications, and a number of suggested solutions along with comments on whether these are the best way of doing it, and any pitfalls and security issues. You get none of that insight if you accept whatever AI spits out.

Three goes to zero as UK mobile provider suffers voice and text outage

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The answer would be to have two different ring tones, the first for establishing a connection and the second for when the far end is actually ringing.

LLMs can hoover up data from books, judge rules

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Re: Nuance shmuance

Reading, and gaining knowledge from a purchased book is fair use, but creating derivative works and exploiting them for commercial gain, such as producing a screenplay, requires obtaining the rights to do so.

Any commercial AI models should also have to licence the rights for their derivative works.

Axiom Mission 4 finally set for launch June 25

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Re: banana !!!!

I don't think anyone would be bothered unless the consequences of failure weren't so spectacular.

Personally I'd take a bit more care checking the code before I hit run, if I was holding up flight's through in a several thousand square mile exclusion zone, and risked several tones of debris potentially coming down on someone's head. But that's just me, and I don't have a rocket company to play with and $billions to buy my way out of any consequences.

Xlibre forks to the rescue – but Kubuntu gives X11 the boot

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Re: Eddies around a sinking ship?

One of the biggest problems is there isn't one Wayland as there is one X11, every window manager has it's own Wayland implementation. So even if it gets fixed in Gnome, that won't fix it for KDE or anything else. It's a massive step backwards.

Put Large Reasoning Models under pressure and they stop making sense, say boffins

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Re: Sigh.

Better to be a jerk than a sap.

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Re: Sigh.

and for which, crucially, the solution was not out there on the web

How can you be so sure?

Just because you didn't find it using a search engine, doesn't mean that it isn't out there. It could be behind a paywall, and the AI scrapers are a lot better at circumventing them than either search enigees or you.

I'm afraid you are just another punter taken in by the Victorian parlour trick that is AI.

Lenovo shows what a Chromebook packing a MediaTek Kompanio Ultra can do

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Flame

Killer... something

The presence of Google’s Gemini AI is said to be the killer app...

Yes, killed my interest straight away.

The AIpocalypse is here for websites as search referrals plunge

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Re: Google and relevance

You really must remember to use the joke icon.

EU Advocate General advises top court to toss Google appeal against €4B fine

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Should we be celebrating the landmark that fines have now gone over 2^32?

Military-tech upstart Anduril pushes further into NATO with German arms maker deal

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I doubt weather any pilot has been able to anticipate another aircraft's manoeuvres from viewing its flight controls since close in engagements between very slow biplanes in WWI.

AFRINIC election delayed after ISP Association wins injunction over voter rights

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Re: Nice

Wasn't he FCC commissioner rather than ICAN

LibreOffice adds voice to 'ditch Windows for Linux' campaign

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Re: As I've said before

Go for a 5B, you can hide it around the back of the monitor or TV and control it with a wireless keyboard+trackpad. It's a neater and more practical solution.

Single passenger reportedly survives Air India Boeing 787 crash

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Re: And Boeing gets blamed

Hosting several FlightRadar24 and FlightAware sites on Raspberry Pi's, and seeing the raw data you appreciate how the services aggregate a large number of low quality sources (compared to dedicated secondary radars) to produce higher quality position data. Tracking ground movements requires a number of sites very close to the airport, or there will be significant gaps and inaccuracies.

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Speaking as a pilot; having the flaps up and the gear down seriously reduces to how far it can glide and it's ability to manoeuvre at low speed. It's still going to come down in short order, but it's the difference between coming down in the middle of a highly populated building, or in more open space nearby

Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43 to drop X11 in GNOME editions

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The MATE desktop will be X11 until the heat death of the universe, if not longer.

AI coding tools are like that helpful but untrustworthy friend, devs say

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Re: Haaaah-hahhhh-ha-ha-ha!!

I hope to god you forgot to select the joke icon.

CIO wants to grow tech team by cloning staff as digital twins and AI agents

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Re: Legal loopholes

Yes but you are forgetting that it's the CEO who decides to replace you with AI and eliminate your job.

He may well decide to get AI to do his job too, but that is only so he can spend more time on the golf course, while reaping the dividends.

Half of businesses rethink ditching humans for customer service bots

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Re: Good

It's far more likely to say;

"OK, I've now signed you up for the 3 year non refundable subscription at twice the annual cost, have a nice day! <click>".

Apple-Intel divorce to be final next year

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P.A. Semi were set up by engineers who created the DEC Alpha and the StrongARM who left when Intel aquired the chip business. These are the chaps that really knew how to get the best out of the ARM architecture, so it was no surprise that Apple took them in-house to design their new silicon.

It's very satisfying seeing Apple back using the same architecture they partnered with Acorn to bring to their earliest hand held devices, and creating some of the best performing chips in class.

Apple goes glass whole as it pours new UI everywhere

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Re: "a fluidity that only Apple can achieve."

At least it's not flat and indistinguishable.

Floppy disks and paper strips lurk behind US air traffic control

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Re: Old Shit

It's going to be the older the system the easier it is to keep going, just as with aeroplanes and racing cars.

Keeping an old spitfire or Lancaster flying - no problem, something just 10 years later such as the Vulcan - very difficult, 10 years later again such as Concorde - impossible.

Similarly with racing cars, any competent mechanic can keep an F1 car from the the early 20th century to the late 80s going, but after they started replying on bespoke ECUs you need a team of specialists from the originating manufacturer to even get them to start. By 2008 the FIA mandated a standard single ECU used by all F1 teams, but there are custom chassis and engine apps, and even if you know how the TAG-320 works, without access to the thousands of parameters which are loaded in, you aren't going to get very far.

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Things like the lack floppy discs can be worked around without having to scrap the entire system. We used to use Compact flash to PATA adaptors as a replacement for floppies, of course that's now obsolete and has been replaced with SD card to PATA adaptors.

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Re: That raises the question of what it runs on.

Yes 8KHz is as far as I go now.

Buy the most expensive Hi-Fi system you can when you are young, as if you wait until you can afford it, you won't be able to fully appreciate it.

Forked-off Xlibre tells Wayland display protocol to DEI in a fire

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Re: Code talks

Not so good as it will small-p politicise what should be a straight forward technical project and ironically discourage participation.

Exactly the opposite, it will discourage politicsm and encourage participation of people who aren't obsessed with imposing codes of conduct on technical projects.

Trump official warns they're putting the squeeze on CHIPS Act winners

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Those dried frog pills really have zing, don't they?

Cellebrite buys Corellium to help cops bust phone encryption

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Re: Other Options!!

It says; "I am a utter cockwomble for posting lines of random characters on The Register's forums."

AI can spew code, but kids should still suffer like we did, says Raspberry Pi

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Re: all tailors should learn to weave cloth by hand

This says everything about why you cant use natural languages for programming

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDA3_5982h8