Posts by druck

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

Re: That is wh toy don’t use a personal number for work.

If you are a consultant, what is you rate for answering the phone? Something suitably extortionate should result in far fewer calls.

Europe's Vega C rocket cleared for launch tonight, first since 2022

Actually I’ve worked on projects that ended up costing well in excess of €1bn, that we could have done on our own for under €50M.

I think we may have identified the common factor in many of those failed projects.

Windows 11 market share falls despite Microsoft ad blitz

Re: Why so much hate from Microsoft to Windows 11 users?

Why not change it to Netscape on XP, that'll teach them.

Submarine cable resilience board announced on same day maybe-cut-by-China Baltic cable repaired

Re: Hanlon's razor

As we've had to fight like buggery just to keep the few remaining black start units from being mothballed, it's not at all certain bet would could bring the entire grid back up easily.

Since the process was planned there have been a lot of changes which have unintended consequences to the resilience of the system. Such as gas fired power stations which can run on oil for 24 hours while the grid is down (no gas pressure), which were designed to use river water as cooling, but the environmentalists got upset about that, so they switched to mains water which will only last 2 hours with the grid out.

China launches first next-gen Long March 12 rocket, christens private spaceport

Re: Burn it up

Let's hope it's better than the 5B, where the booster can come down randomly on just about anywhere that isn't China.

Brits think AI in the workplace is all chat, no bot for now

Oh dear, an AC AI snake oil salesman doesn't like reality.

Fine print in Intel's CHIPS Act deal includes requirement to keep control of its foundries

Re: Tough

Hell, without Intel the computing landscape we have today simply wouldn't exist.

Yes, without Intel's legacy x86 baggage and monopolistic practices which destroyed every other competing chip architecture (except ARM), things would look very different, and maybe even a lot better.

Yup, half of that thought-leader crap on LinkedIn is indeed AI scribbled

It's easy to skip over the AI generated text, but what really gets my goat is the AI pictures. Most are shockingly bad, and their overwhelming wrongness distracts from even the most interesting subject matter - JUST DON'T USE THEM!

Ten years under Dr Su: How AMD went from budget Intel alternative to x86 contender

Re: Still not competing in mobile markets

Try ASUS. I'm using a two year old Strix G15 gaming laptop for work - yes I thought that too, but it is much better than the high end Dell and Lenovo I had previously. The 16 thread Ryzen 9 is extremely quick, and while it isn't thin and light, instead of constant fighter taking off on afterburner fan noise, it has two large fans which spend most of the time off when running Linux, but when they are on have a nice low pitch tone which is far less annoying.

Microsoft informed of yet another antitrust probe by US authorities

There's the rub, both being bad crap at something and also so good barely adequate that third-party mitigations are not required considered cost effective.

FTFY

No, Broadcom did not just end VMware's flagship VCDX certification program

Re: Broadcom

And it's not like this isn't what everyone said would happen.

Bing Wallpaper app, now in Windows Store, accused of cookie shenanigans

Re: Just how long can Microsoft

Christ, you actually want to use Outlook?

Security? We've heard of it: How Microsoft plans to better defend Windows

Re: "security is our top priority,"

I do wonder how many 'top priorities' there are, and how swiftly they get replaced by the one next in line.

This is Microsoft whose slogan a few years ago was "Mobile first, cloud first".

Showing they are as unaware of the meaning of the word 'first' as they are of the word 'security'.

M4 MacBook Pro shows Apple is still glued to the idea of unfixable laptops

Re: MacBook Pro

Maybe he was just holding it wrong.

Microsoft shuttering dedicated licensing education, certification site

Licencing is so yesterday

Who needs licencing when you can pay a continually increasing subscription charge for everything, every month, FOR EVER.

Public developer spats put bcachefs at risk in Linux

I'm sure you could lend Jake yours, after you've finished colouring in the pictures of course.

Re: user friendly (as contrasted with beginner friendly) program

The core of systemd, allowing you to write init scripts is quite friendly i.e. what the damn thing was supposed to do. However, all the crap that has been added to it, with it's tentacles crawling in to ever more areas of Linux, and replacing other perfectly good programs with arcane and often buggy implementations which Peottering WILL NOT FIX, is why there is so much entirely justifiable hate.

Re: Are we reaching a monolithic limit?

We are talking about dynamic linking within the kernel, not about general programs and libraries. In this context it's more about keeping modules independent of each other, than sharing code.

Datacenters could blow up your electric bill thanks to AI

Re: brownouts and blackouts

Would be great except the UK government has classified them as critical infrastructure, so we will be sitting in the cold and dark while shitty AI hallucinates away in comfort.

AI PCs: 'Something will have to give in 2025, and I think it's pricing'

A NPU only does very low precision FP calculations, which are useless for anything other than useless AI.

Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive

Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

AI pictures are shit though, most of the time their overwhelm wrongness is so distracting whatever content they are meant to be accompanying goes unnoticed.

Google's AI bug hunters sniff out two dozen-plus code gremlins that humans missed

At last a use for AI

Throwing unexpected random crap at APIs is an ideal use for gen AI, expecting it to be able to patch the code properly - madness.

Microsoft goes thin client with $349 Windows 365 Link mini PC

For less than half...

...you could get a Raspberry Pi 5 and NVMe case (dual 4K monitor support, 4 USB, 4 real CPUs, 8GB RAM, 1TB storage) and run Linux for precisely $0/month, forever.

Database warhorse SQL Server 2025 goes all-in on AI

SQL Copilot

Now even databases can make shit up.

Windows 95 setup was three programs in a trench coat, Microsoft vet reveals

The excitement of installing Windows 95 for the first time?

Rather boring for those of us that by the time W95 came out had been instantly booting a vastly superior GUI from ROM for the previous 6 years on Acorn RISC OS machines.

US, China agree machines must not be allowed to control nuclear weapons

Re: However look at Russia's Dead Hand system

Let's hope our sub's operating procedures are updated before Radio 4 on long wave is turned off next year, to avoid any unfortunate incidents.

Microsoft Exchange update fixes security flaws, breaks other stuff

Re: Same old same old

I can see why you would want to post that as AC, if anyone found out what the company was, they would be inundated with job applications.

Here's how a Trump presidency could change the tech industry

Re: Here's how a Trump presidency could change the World

You don't think that all someone has to do is whisper in his ear; "See that red button there? It will Make America Great Again most bigly.", and he wouldn't just press it in a heartbeat?

HPE goes Cray for Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs, crams 224 into a single cabinet

Re: REMARK

I'm sure you thought that meant something when you wrote it.

Southeast Asian nations revise semiconductor strategies as Trump's shadow looms

Not free taster

In anticipation of Trump's tariff policy which will be so bigly good for the US, why wait?

Stick 20% on the price of everything going to the US now, and let them enjoy the new era of not so free trade.

Admins can give thanks this November for dollops of Microsoft patches

Re: And yet ..

That will be updates for your OS and hundreds of installed apps, all done in a matter of seconds, and no reboot.

With Windows, update, reboot, update again, and only then you can look forward to a dozen apps nagging you to update them one after the other.

China's Volt Typhoon crew and its botnet surge back with a vengeance

Re: "because the routers are end-of-life, the vendor no longer issues security updates"

I've got 3 ASUS routers, the oldest is 11 years old and is still getting updates to it's Merlin software. They can all run OpenWRT too.

Incidentally I'm using the RT-AX86U as the main router, the RT-AC86U as a mesh node on another floor, and the oldest RT-AC68U as a WiFi Bridge to the Raspberry Pi in the shed at the bottom of the garden.

Will Windows Insiders find Recall lurking under the Christmas tree?

Utter contempt

Reintroducing 'recall' after it was widely derided and rejected, shows the utter contempt Microsoft holds it users in.

If they can make any money out of it, no matter how much harm it will subject users to, they will do it.

AMD grabs a quarter of x86 market with desktop gains, but server growth slows

Re: Who's still wanting Intel chips?

That and illegal Intel Marketing campaigns.

No pilot? No problem! EHang's autonomous air taxis take off in Thailand

So safe they rubber stamped it thrice

The aircraft has three airworthiness certificates from the Civil Aviation Administration of China.

I don't care if it has a dozen worthless bits of Chinese paper, there is no way I would get on one, or be under the flight path of one - speaking from experience of either of my roles of software engineer and private pilot.

Dark web crypto laundering kingpin sentenced to 12.5 years in prison

Pardon on the way

While any mildly lucid country would ban mixers which serve no other purpose than money laundering, and any sensible one would ban crime enabling crypto all together, Trump wants America to become the Crypto Crime Capital of the world, so running a mixer wont be in any way illegal.

The sad tale of the Alpha massacre

Re: Slightly better than nothing...

Christ, I didn't realise you could do that!

Even worse, you can create a file called -rf so that a rm * then deletes the whole directory hierarchy from that point down.

Killer app for AI is still years away, says industry analyst

Re: If you want your mind blown…

Why not ask AI to plagiarise summarize it?

Re: The killer app is crime

Well done for pointing out another type of crime it can be used for.

The killer app is crime

Just like cryto currencies found their kill app in facilitating ransomware and fraud payments, AI has found it's killer app in creating more plausible scam emails, generating fake election images, and audio/videos tricking people in to transferring funds to criminals. And just like with crypto, every other non-criminal use has been a complete failure.

Unbreakable Voyager space probes close in on a 50 year mission

Re: I wish …

The Radio Thermal Generator would still be keeping them quite toasty.

Judge tosses publishers' copyright suit against OpenAI

What is the point...

...of creating any content and putting it on the internet, when AI is going to suck it up, and only $billion dollar companies profit?

The court has given them the green light even before Trump can set Musk off on his bonfire of the regulators.

Microsoft still not said anything about unexpected Windows Server 2025 installs

Don't give Musk ideas

"Imagine if your electric car – say, a Tesla – received an automatic software update, but you couldn't drive on the new version, until you entered your credit card details to pay the full MSRP once again for the upgrade. Tesla would promptly be out of business, especially since you already paid for the car once."

He'd do it, what's another lawsuit or two, and Tesla customers would still keep coming back for more low quality non self driving rubbish.

The Register takes AMD's Ryzen 9800X3D for a spin

I'd look at what anti-virus you are mandated on that machine, rather than it's CPU, as you obviously aren't running any AV on your 286 or ZX80.

Thanks, Linus. Torvalds patch improves Linux performance by 2.6%

Re: Would Android benefit?

I believe this is x86/AMD64 only optimisation, while there are a few x86 powered Android phones and tablets, the vast majority are ARM.

French govt finance panel mulls nationalizing Atos

Re: So the US will be sanctioning them then?

Perhaps the US and UK governments trust the French government not to spy on them.

You are funny.

Python dethrones JavaScript as the most-used language on GitHub

Re: It's completely bollocks

C and C++ are not the same language, any more than others using C like syntax.

Ignorance or inexperience?

Python is suitable from anything from simple linear scripting, right up to huge object orientated systems.

I've worked on both and everything in between, and I've not found anything quicker or easier to write, debug and maintain.

Amazon's nuclear datacenter dreams stall as watchdog rejects power deal

Re: Orange Jesus

His side kick Musk will also eliminate government waste, such as any form of business regulation.

Windows 11 continues to creep up behind Windows 10

Rust in the Windows kernel

I'm more concerned about the dry rot.