Posts by druck

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

If you don't use an inkjet at least a couple of times every week, it will clog, so it is the wrong technology for you.

Laser printers can power up, print a page in seconds, and be switched off again without wasting a grain of toner.

Two arrested after pensioner scammed out of six-figure crypto nest egg

Not really, over 18 months up to last summer I held the maximum of £50,000 of premium bonds, and the winnings averaged out to about 3% to 3.5% APR where as even instant access savings accounts were paying over 4%. Obviously I didn't get any of the larger prizes, in fact I've never won more than £700 in one draw, nor last time when I had the maximum amount before I bought a house 16 years ago and it was supposed to slightly more generous then.

Plus the £1 bond my neighbour bought the year before I was born, and gifted to my mother for me, has won sod all, not even a shilling as it was back then.

Dark mode might be burning more juice than you think

Re: And have these idiots...

And even dark mode hardly ever uses truck black, because its uncomfortable or too harsh.

I like my dark mode to actually be dark instead of a light grey on dark grey smush. So when using the DarkReader browser plugin I set brightness -20% and contrast +20%, so the background is black. I can then turn down the monitor brightness so it is not so harsh.

DXC paid 50% more than original contract value for disastrous public sector Oracle project

Re: "UK should develop its own system"

I would say then lets start a company to make such a thing, but there are two problems; first if any ERP or integrator got a sniff of what you are doing they would either try to sue you out of existence, or buy and bury you. Second; as a small company you wont get considered for any local or national government work with out a long history of disastrous failures behind and ahead of you. How else could you describe the usual suspects.

Trump can't quickly or easily kill the CHIPS Act, but he can fire the workers funded by it

Re: CHIPS Act is $280 billion

After Tesla of course.

Type-safe C-killer Delphi hits 30, but a replacement has risen

Re: Compared to Delphi, FPC and Lazarus are a joke

It's the King's English these days.

Mobile operators brace for bigger, faster headaches with 6G

Re: 4g is fine

I was suckered in to getting EE with their supposed better network (more spectrum) as everyone kept saying O2 which I was on was rubbish. Now in built up parts of Surrey where I had good 4G on O2, I now get slightly faster 5G on EE, but everywhere I was barely getting any O2 4G (still in built up areas) I now get absolutely no 4G or 5G with EE.

Improve the coverage, not the speed.

Snake Keylogger slithers into Windows, evades detection with AutoIt-compiled payload

Big is not big anymore

I remember back when no one would have thought of malware being written in C#, due to requiring the download of mammoth .NET frameworks.

Indian authorities seize loot from collapsed BitConnect crypto scam

Re: I can't help it

"mainly" even!

Re: I can't help it

It's many 0's, whether it's in the wallet or between the ears.

Kelsey Hightower on dodging AI and the need for a glossary of IT terms

Hightower

Wasn't he in Police Academy?

UK electrical utility seeks partner for £81M SAP overhaul as support deadline closes in

Turn that fraction upside down.

A UK electrical infrastructure biz is seeking a systems integrator to help it migrate from a 25-year-old SAP ERP system to the latest S/4HANA platform in a contract set to be worth almost a quarter of its annual turnover.

And will end up costing at least 4x their annual turn over.

The future of AI is ... analog? Upstart bags $100M to push GPU-like brains on less juice

Analogue might be low power...

...but it's also far slower than digital logic, just like biological brains.

Fujitsu worries US tariffs will see its clients slow digital spend

Long March, Short Drop

The launcher is said to have trimmed 200kg compared to the first Long March 8 models, and to have added features that allow it to carry and deploy more satellites and do so more efficiently.

Well I suppose those countries downrange of the launch site should be grateful for slightly less mass of the upper stage making an uncontrolled re-entry on top of them.

This open text-to-speech model needs just seconds of audio to clone your voice

They Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not They Could, They Didn’t Stop To Think If They Should

Jeff Goldblum, Jurassic Park.

Trump admin seeks to reclassify federal CIOs, opening door to political appointees

Re: The word you are looking for USA is...

They'll be back out of the woodwork when it's succession time.

Re: The word you are looking for USA is...

His has children, and grandchildren. Dictators like to start dynasties.

Re: Political appointees as CIOs - what could possibly go wrong?

As soon as Trump is gone, the Trump movement will be dead, too.

The Great Leader will be succeeded by the Dear Leader who will be succeeded by Eternal Chairman President.

International Space Station's out-of-this-world selfie booth turns 15

Re: Great selfie

My oldest son, then 9, got to ask her a question on a live video from Farnborough Air Show to the ISS back in 2022, afterwards I was jumping up and down saying "you got to talk to an actual astronaut IN SPACE!!!!", having watched things like ST:TNG he didn't think it was anything particularly unusual!

WordPress war latest: Ploy to trademark Hosted WordPress, Managed WordPress derailed

unprotected.org is unavailable.org

I'm getting either a DNS failure or a Firebase holding page.

IBM return-to-office order hits finance, ops teams amid push to dump staff for AI

And IBM are vying to get there first.

I'm a security expert, and I almost fell for a North Korea-style deepfake job applicant …Twice

Re: And right in the middle ...

Advert? What's that?

Re: Interesting

Just like with Indian outsourcing firms the person you speak to initially who knows his stuff, isn't the one which you find is allocated to do the actual work for you.

Some workers already let AI do the thinking for them, Microsoft researchers find

Mind vim

g/Uses GenAI/s/knowledge worker/fucking idiot/

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

Re: Say what?

I think we can infer Microsoft was trying to sell something, what I'm not sure.

Say what?

The Linux kernel added support for Rust code on October 3, 2022, shortly after Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich argued that new programming projects should be written in Rust rather than C or C++.

Since when has the utterings of a Microsoft lackey had any bearing on Linux kernel development?

UK Home Office silent on alleged Apple backdoor order

Re: Who is more stupid? The Home Office or the disgruntled Apple users ?

You haven't read what I wrote, even slightly.

Re: Who is more stupid? The Home Office or the disgruntled Apple users ?

The Diffie/Hellman key exchange sets up an encrypted channel used to transfer data from you to the remote server. It does not encrypt the data at rest, for that you need a symmetric key or asymmetric keypair which you retain to able to decrypt the data again at a later date.

Re: Rugpull

VW have form in that area.

'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama

Given his stance against C++, I can't understand why he would OK Rust. Keep it all C, and let someone else start again in <whatever>.

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

The boss thought he knew everything

Small company back in the 90s, one desktop machine used as the network file server and Exchange email server, and a boss who thought he knew everything. Being 90s, the machine enviably died, but the boss wasn't worried as he fastidiously backed up every week, never failing to rotate the tapes and keep them securely in the fire safe. The restore claimed success, and all the files (except anything newer than a few days) were back, but Exchange wasn't happy despite it's database file being present. It was only when he consulted the backup program's logs for the very first time, that he discovered the warning message that the Exchange database couldn't be backup up as the running process had it locked, and very helpfully it had stored a zero byte file on the backup every week for the last two years.

At that point he asked for help, but I was unable to suggest anything other than reconvening to the pub to drown his sorrows.

Re: Key - what key?

An encrypted or even just compressed backup has more riskl. If you have a single bit flipped due to a disk or tape error, you may get an incorrect character in a text document or database, or a corrupted pixel in an image. But if it is encrypted or compressed, you lose the ability to recover the rest the file from the point of corruption onwards.

That's why it's not a backup, but backups, you need to ensure you have many copies, then even if encrypted or compressed, you have a good chance of recovering each piece of data.

SoftBank woos OpenAI with $40B, making Microsoft's $13B look quaint

The next WeWork

Softbank is going to find massively diminishing returns from spunking yet more billions on AI, and are going to be left with something equivalent to the value of their investment in WeWork in a few years.

If Ransomware Inc was a company, its 2024 results would be a horror show

Mixers unbanned

Another factor is the criminals are learning that Bitcoin transactions and other forms of digi-cash transfers are harder to hide than expected, which means the ransomware business model becomes riskier. That could be the result of concerted police action against cryptocurrency mixers...

Well Trump has removed sanctions from Tornado Cash, which will help ransomware criminals get back on track to record profits.

But the rest of the world could put a stop to this by banning crypto, and completely destroying the ransomware business model.

Why UK Online Safety Act may not be safe for bloggers

Run and hide

I see many sites closing down their comment sections altogether, rather than risk being subjected to this thoughtless and over-broad law, maybe even here The Register.

Musk’s DOGE ship gets ‘full’ access to Treasury payment system, sinks USAID

Re: Idiots took over

You forgot the joke icon.

The only skill his appointees have is answering "yes".

Motorola appeal over £200M price cap for Airwave service rejected

At this rate ESN will be delivered around 2 years after they rip down the last 4G masts.

Microsoft vet laments a world where even toothbrushes need reboots

Re: This, we're told, is progress

When you are young you think anything new must be better, anything different must be better, and anyone disagreeing is just old.

When you are older you have the wisdom to know that everything new or different isn't always better.

If you don't get wise by the time you get old, there isn't really much hope for you.

Re: Microsoft vet

I think the word you want to use is veteran, which is often shorted to vet in the US, but in the UK is more commonly short for veterinarian.

Intel has officially missed the boat for AI in the datacenter

Re: Granite Shores, Lunar Lake, Gaudi3, Jaguar Shores

They've use the names of mountains, lakes and forests, given their current situation it's probably time to start on deserts.

Another banner year for ransomware gangs despite takedowns by the cops

Re: Kill it stone dead

Make it illegal to use Crypto - problem solved.

DeepSeek stirs intrigue and doubt across the tech world

Re: Training data

Someone training a model behind the Great Firewall might be forced to find an alternative source

The restrictions of the Great Firewall only applies to normal citizens, any enterprise with CCP backing can slurp everything.

Even Windows 10 cannot escape the new Outlook

Re: No such luck

You seem to be under this impression that it is your machine, Microsoft says otherwise.

CDNs: Great for speeding up the internet, bad for location privacy

Re: Ha.....Where Is The Commentard Troll Actually Located?

Even if they use a VPN, analysing the posting time distribution tends to give away their time zone.

Boom's XB-1 jet nails supersonic flight for first time

Re: My opinion

Concorde went out of usability, for one it was never profitable, and it was not safe enough.

The British Airways Concordes did operate profitably pre-911. They were also very well maintained and very safe, unlike the Air France operation.

I'll always regret never going on one of those at the RIAT, it was £400 for a quick subsonic hop and £800 to go supersonic over the Bay of Biscay. It seemed a lot back then, until they announced that Concorde was being retired, then you realised it was ridiculously cheap for something which you would never be able to experience again, as all the transatlantic flights were fully booked up, regardless of cost.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Re: Question re backups

Linux Mint comes with Timeshift for backing up the OS at checkpoints, and Back In Time for user data where you can restore individual files. Both will do timed backups and keep a series of differential snapshots.

US AI shares battered, bruised, and holding after yesterday's DeepSeek beating

Re: Too early...

O'Really? How many 'r's does that have again?

Google Maps to roll out Trump-approved Denali and Gulf of Mexico rebrands

Re: Its Trump's version of the nine dashed lines

At least both McKinley or Denali are pronounceable by the majority of the entire nation, unlike whatever Wales has called Mount Snowden and the Brecon Beacons.