Posts by druck

Microsoft will stop pestering Windows users about Edge in EU

Re: Almost there

Did it give you the choice, or did you have know to prevent the machine being able to access the internet?

Atlassian tweaks licenses to reward those who buy more, but gets its sums wrong

Re: Jensen Huang now runs Atlassian?

That was 'EI'.

Feds arrest DoD techie, claim he dumped top secret files in park for foreign spies to find

Re: Let me spy, make me a citizen?

something as temporary as a 4 year leader

Are you sure about that?

Thunderbird is go: 139 follows closely on Firefox's heels

Re: "reply in plain text with bottom-posting very quickly sorts marketroids from techies"

Reversing top posting gets you bottom posting (all previous posts in full, followed by the reply) which is just as bad.

What we actually want is interleaved posting, where you quote only the points you are replying to, and put your contribution below each point.

Doing that automatically would be very difficult, although I'm sure AI could hallucinate up something.

The UK wants you to sign up for £1B cyber defense force

Re: The wrong trousers Grommet

It was pretty much the same back in the late 80s when I tried to knock them up for some sponsorship for my degree course. Managed to get through a whole hour and a half of interview at Oakley before finding out they only considered a very particular type of engineering degree, and weren't willing to show any flexibility. But other doors eventually opened.

I was thinking more like Dad's Army with wooden keyboards.

Ransomware attack on MATLAB dev MathWorks – licensing center still locked down

Physical is better, free is best

The last software I bought came in a box with a printed manual and a floppy disk, well ok a CD.

No problems with licencing servers then, and none with FOSS since.

Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves

AI isn't search!

Search gives you the source of the information so you can at least attempt judge it's providence, despite googles best efforts.

AI gives you a plausibly worded text which you have to take on blind faith isn't the result of model collapsed slop.

The elusive goal of Unix – or Linux – simplicity

Re: "Advocacy..."

What you are describing is the old Windows CE/Mobile devices which tried to be an NT desktop on a 240x320 screen controlled by tiny keys or a pointy stick. Very easy to port Windows applications to, but a complete failure when it came to using it, and it rightly died a death. What took it's place was the Android and IOS interfaces, which are vastly better to use on phones or tablets. But just as the conventional desktop didn't work on those hand held devices, their interfaces do not work on a laptop or monitor. Attempting to bring across indistinct UI elements and abominations such as the hamburger menu to large screen mouse and keyboard controlled device, and abandoning CUA principles is a massive mistake.

How Java changed the development landscape entirely as code turns 30

Re: The new COBOL

And then Python has the idiocy of whitespace having meaning, So an extra or missing tab can still be perfectly valid yet be completely wrong, all to avoid a couple of {}

The compiler might not fail a missing tab, but a code review certainly will. It's not a problem for anyone which actually uses Python.

Microsoft dumps AI into Notepad as 'Copilot all the things' mania takes hold in Redmond

Re: Smells of desperation

Microsoft - making tools that only idiots can use.

Neptune OS is Debian made easy but, boy, does it need some housekeeping

Re: Psudo security

If you log in, even via `sudo -s`

sudo -i

surely?

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

Re: The best keyboard...

I grew up on the BBC Micro (which had a CAPS and a Shift lock key), but my favourite keyboard was the one on the Archimedes A310 closely followed by the A5000. Great feel, reassuringly loud, and CTRL on the home row where it should be. It was a US layout, but we didn't realise until the RISC PC came with a UK layout and had to re-learn everything. It also had a beautiful symmetry of the main group, and most importantly; red function keys.

UK 'extremely dependent' on US for space security

Re: Good article

The problem is most of the British defence companies have been bought up by the US over the last couple of decades.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang labels US GPU export bans ‘precisely wrong’ and ‘a failure’

Re: Upset with China

So they claim, but plenty of top end cards are being smuggled in to the middle kingdom, so they are using them for something.

AMD puts Intel in rear view mirror with Threadripper Pro 9000 high-end desktop chips

Re: 350W!!

Different base clocks. You can either have lots of cores going slowly, or a smaller number going faster, and then one or too getting the really quick boost speeds for a very limited time.

Virgin Media O2 patches hole that let callers snoop on your coordinates

Re: Meter/Metre

FTFY: The house style at The Register being American English wrong.

Fired US govt workers, Uncle Xi wants you! – to apply for this fake consulting gig

Re: Not original

Microsoft's Cambridge Research lab was set up for that very purpose, they didn't want anyone starting another Acorn.

Microsoft winnows: Layoffs hit software engineers hard

Re: Start the clock!

The big tech companies have arguably been over-recruiting for years in a weird game of beggar-my-neighbour They've had plenty of time to wind that down in an orderly and more humane fashion but chose not to.

Nothing boosts the stock price more than laying off a good proportion of the staff, I think they recruit a few thousand extra every year just to be able to do this.

CoreWeave may have built a house of (graphics) cards

Hope you are working on your exit scam

They obviously have some plan to walk away with buckets of cash when it inevitably all goes tits up, and leaves the investors with nothing more than a shed load obsolete GPUs.

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: Divers log

Not only was the zero left out of 1.5pm but there wasn't even a zero on most type writers, you used an 'O' instead. Which is where saying 'oh' instead of zero in things like telephone numbers - "dial oh one for London".

A year on, Valkey charts path to v9 after break from Redis

Sorry, nothing useful to say

Valkyrie would have been a much cooler name.

Here's what we know about the DragonForce ransomware that hit Marks & Spencer

Re: And that's why you should NEVER pay a ransom...

Wont work, far better is to make illegal the only viable way of payment that supports the entire ransomware business model - crypto currencies.

Saudi CubeSat gets golden ticket on doomed SLS rocket

Re: Starship will never be practical

Less practical even than rebuilding the Saturn V.

Irony is you could ship the one at the Johnson Space Centre off to a workshop in Shenzhen, and they'd make you half a dozen exact copies for 1/1000th of an SLS - one of them might even work too.

Nip chip smugglers by building trackers into GPUs, US Senator suggests

Re: Alternate approach :) ... otherwise known as Stupid Idea No. 2.

You are not supposed to drink the moose urine.

Microsoft wants us to believe AI will crack practical fusion power, driving future AI

AI Bullshit sigularity

The only way AI will assist in the development of fusion is if all the AI bullshit collapses under it's own mass to form a singularity, and you feed some deuterium in to it.

RISC OS Open plots great escape from 32-bit purgatory

Re: Small suggestions for improvements

Application folders don't really need to start with a '!' these days, as the special files can be looked for in any folder with very little cost. But RISC OS was developed when the primary storage was still floppy discs, and opening a folder to see if contained a !Run or a !Sprites file involved a couple of seconds of spinning up the disc and clunking of the read head to achieve.

Re: Security?

We don't really need code signing, there are so few developers left we can probably look at the code and put a name to it more easily than we could with a face.

The final bookworm-based Raspberry Pi OS update arrives

Half there

No problems on the Pi's I've upgraded, but they are all using Xorg so don't need any of the new Wayland features, which mostly seem to be restoring stuff from Xorg that's missing in Wayland.

I've still got half a dozen Pi's running Bullseye as they have cameras and use the RaspImJPEG software which requires the legacy camera API. I'm still waiting for that to be rewritten to use libcamera before I can update those Pis.

Human error and power glitches to blame for most outages

Re: The obvious solution is...

Not even funny.

Raspberry Pi slices Compute Module 4 prices

Re: Relentless price increases are not obligatory

(near) gigabit ethernet instead of 100Mbit

Both the Pi 4 and Pi 5 are true gigabit Ethernet able to sustain around 976mb/s in each direction.

Maybe you are thinking of the Pi 3B which could do about 300mb/s over a gigabit Ethernet link.

Ex-NSA cyber-boss: AI will soon be a great exploit coder

Reverse bullshit

AI can also help defenders. Roland said one his human staff engineers reverse engineered a piece of eBPF code – a job that took about half a day. "The AI system took about 30 seconds," Rowland said.

But if you haven't done the manual reverse engineering, how do you know the AI output isn't bullshit?

Duolingo jumps aboard the 'AI-first' train, will phase out contractors

My wife is trying improving her German with it, but from what I can overhear, most of it seems to involve grill parties (BBQs).

808 lines of BBC BASIC and a dream: Arm architecture turns 40

Re: Reverie: 1987

I was there too, a little bit older as I was in my second year at university, and an A310 is what my grant cheque got spent on - who needs books or food - I'd just got enough left for a few sub pound a pint student union beers. I'm still using RISC OS on a Raspberry Pi 4.

Fujitsu and its no public sector bids promises... what happened to them?

Re: And the Postmasters?

We damn well should have been. Time to rip up contracts/licences that absolve any software company from supplying shoddy products, but you are quite right we should start with the worst.

Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction

New for old

Avoid a single PC with virtual machines if you can – it's another layer to distract your most precious asset, your attention, plus it will always feel like a slightly inferior option to dedicated hardware.

You've probably still got that perfectly good machine that Windows 11 won't run on, and it will work better than it ever did when new with Linux on it.

Oh, cool. Microsoft melts bug that froze Server 2025 Remote Desktop sessions

Listen to the tulips.

If you need AI to tell you that you are better off ditching Windows, no wonder you are still using Windows.

As ChatGPT scores B- in engineering, professors scramble to update courses

Re: Calculator and non-calculator exams

If every second time you pressed equals on a calculator it just made up the result, we'd all still happily be using slide rules and log tables.

India gets Google to unbundle Android and the Play Store on Smart TVs

Re: How that would improve competition...

Make sure you choose an edgy name.

Trump blinks: 'Substantially' lower China tariffs promised

American divorce

“‘America First’ does not mean America alone. To the contrary, it is a call for deeper collaboration and mutual respect among trade partners,” Bessent said Wednesday at an Institute of International Finance event in Washington, DC.

What partners? That boat has sailed.

This is not just any 'cyber incident' … this is an M&S 'cyber incident'

It's been all downhill since they got rid of the tills which returned any change down a slide at the back of the till, I loved that as a kid.

Europe's cloud customers eyeing exit from US hyperscalers

Re: Just do it!

Vastly optimistic.

Bank of England flirts with offline digital dosh

Re: Just say no to CBDC

Traditional banking has largely been made redundant by digital currencies and the blockchain, since there is no longer a requirement for a trusted intermediary

Says some AC idiot, who sooner or later will be parted with whatever pretend money / scam coinage he has bought, and better not come crying to us about it.

Static electricity can be shockingly funny, but the joke's over when a rack goes dark

Racing static

The McLaren Technology Centre has ceramic tiles on the floor of the boulevard, but every time I reached for the stainless steel banister to go up the stairs, I got a massive static shock. At least I was properly grounded by the time I got to the lab to work on the F1 ECUs.

CVE fallout: The splintering of the standard vulnerability tracking system has begun

Re: China, some suggestions

I suspect that is "EVER" in the millennial sense of nothing worthwhile existing before the year 2000.

Writing for humans? Perhaps in future we'll write specifically for AI – and be paid for it

Victorian Fraud

The rise of AI is very similar to the popularism of psychics and seances in Victorian times, which through convincing theatrics gave people just enough correct information to fool them in to disregarding the falsehoods, and it took a while to educate everyone of the fundamental fraud behind it.

Security shop pwns ransomware gang, passes insider info to authorities

Re: Spinning wheels

FTFY: NOTHING is going to stop ransomware or other digital crime while crypto currency continues to be legal.

50 years ago the last Saturn rocket rolled out of NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building

Re: So, what's developed in the last 50 years?

And lets not forget that also enabled it to launch and service the Hubble telescope.

British govt wants to mainline AI, but its arteries are clogged with legacy tech

What is this bollocks?

The ambition to harness the potential of one of the most significant technological developments of modern times is of course to be welcomed.

Is it fuck. Allowing workshy or incompetent civil servants to use a statistical bullshit generator to further lower the quality of government services is certainly not something to be welcomed.

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Re: Power cycling bigger kit is not a hobby I would endorse

Back in the late 80s were doing non destructive testing of power stations and used a BBC Micro to control the equipment and log results. They told us we could expect anything from 150V to 280V on site, so we got hold of a VariAC the size of a beer barrel and connect an unsuspecting Beeb to it. We managed to turn it right down to just a shade over 100V before it's linear power supply gave up, which was impressive as it wasn't a 110V/240V unit. The hairier test was to see how high it could go, I tentatively raised it to 280V and it seemed fine, nothing getting too hot. I would have been happy to leave it there, but the boss insisted we go to 300V, and after making sure I wasn't going to get blamed for frying it, we turned it up, and it was fine running for over 10 minutes - hardy stuff those old Micros!