Posts by druck

Boeing's Starliner finds yet another way to not reach space

Re: Can someone please take this POS out back

You do know this mission is a manned one?

Researchers warn robot cars can be crashed with tinfoil and paint daubed on cardboard

I also wish to rent a part of the M25

You probably want Millbrook Proving Ground, as every film or TV show shot in the UK which features something dangerous happening on a road, uses either their stretch of simulated motorway or the alpine circuit.

UK Surface owners can now take misbehaving laptops to Currys

Re: Three times a looser

You got me, I'm always spelling loser, looser.

Three times a looser

1. You've bought Microsoft hardware

2. It's broken

3. You've taken it to Curry's to fix

Google finally addresses those bizarre AI search results

Re: Sure, polish that turd

Using something based on Microsoft search is not going to be a way to avoid a

AI enshitification.

Codd almighty! Has it been half a century of SQL already?

Re: Lecture material

Where's your reg badge gone?

Surging datacenter power demand slows the demise of US coal plants

Data centre tax

It doesn't matter how close to a nuclear plant or renewables they build build their data centres, its the total demand which is keeping coal in the mix and they are responsible for greatly increasing that.

The only way I see of tackling it is to work out how to tax total power usage by the data centre industry exponentially above typical 2022 levels, so the massive expansion to handle AI generates enough tax revenue to pay for the infrastructure investment to allow coal to be phased out faster.

Windows 11 24H2 might call time on that old NAS under the stairs

Re: Workaround

It's easy to turn back on though, and you could bind a dedicated SMB process to a specific network interface that only has the old NAS on it for extra security.

We had the problem the other way around on RISC OS as the client was SMBv1 only and couldn't talk to modern a NAS which only supported v3, but a Raspberry Pi running Linux can act as a protocol relay, and you could do that here too.

Arm is so, so over this AI accelerator unit craze

After the bubble

ARM definitely has the right idea about avoiding optional custom NPUs which complicate the software environment. However, I wonder when the AI bubble has burst how long we will be stuck with silicon wasted on otherwise useless FP16 and FP8 instructions, before they are dropped. I suspect it will persist in to ARMv10, so is that going to be ARMv11 or ARMv12?

Fancy climbing the peaks of Alpine Linux? 3.20 is out

Re: Good for old netbooks

I've found our pair of EEE-PC 701s under the sofa again, they were updated to Debian 8 last time that happened. The kids saw them and want to play, so I'm going to put Tiny Core Linux on the 512MB one, but I think I'll try Alpine on the 1GB one.

The Reg builds official Lego Artemis and Milky Way sets

That's not any old Saturn V, but SA-513 with Skylab onboard.

China shows off machine-gun-toting robot dog and its AI-powered puppy

Re: Charge! (at the nearest power outlet)

The rifle isn't belt fed, so it's going to exhaust it's single magazine long before it runs out of batteries.

PayPal is planning an ad network built off your purchase history

Re: Won't get much out of me

This one time at Bandcamp...

We polled thousands of IT pros – and sustainability just ain't a priority right now

@Heyrick; crypto hasn't stopped pissing away vast amounts of power, it's now been joined by AI pissing away even more.

Ubuntu 24.04 upgrades available – to Mantic users

Re: Desktop Choice

There's something to be said for leaving something that works well alone.

MATE can use either normal or HiDPI screens, but not a mixture.

As for an answer to Wayland, I think you can guess it will end in off.

I stumbled upon LLM Kryptonite – and no one wants to fix this model-breaking bug

Re: No need to imagine

That's been every version of Windows since 1.0

Read AI about it... OpenAI does deal with News Corp

Burn baby burn

Bodkin argues that AI access to data needs to be democratized using distributed technologies, such as micropayments on a blockchain.

As if burning half the planet to power AI wasn't bad enough, he wan'ts to burn the other half to power blockchain scam coins to pay for it.

It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

Azure? Microsoft Azure? Have you ever heard the saying; out of the frying pan and in to the fire?

It was Oracle, what other trigger could you possibly need?

Canada's London Drugs confirms ransomware attack after LockBit demands $25M

Re: Criminalize ransom

Let's ban crypto instead, and see if the foriegn criminals manage to collect the $25m in cash from under a bridge.

NYSE parent gets $10M wrist tap for failing to report 2021 systems break-in

I'd add to that they also need to provide a credible mitigation plan and have a couple years of monitoring to ensure it has been fully implemented, to avoid the penalty.

Laundering cash from healthcare, romance scams lands US man in prison for a decade

No crypto, no getting away with it

This shows that when scams involve real money rather than crypto, the perpetrators cam be caught and jailed.

If the ranomsware business was forced to use the banking system, or cash under a bridge instead of crypto to get the payouts, it wouldn't be around for long either.

LockBit dethroned as leading ransomware gang for first time post-takedown

Re: "We should be adopting AI to fight against these threats."

If pounds and pennies were the only way to pay, the vast majority of ransomware and other online scams would not be possible - ban crypto.

Zoom adds 'post-quantum' encryption for video nattering

Re: Overkill

Firstly quantum computers wont be cracking cryptograph, ever.

Secondly post quantum algorithms are not proven to be as secure as what we already have.

So in essence the whole announcement is just more snake oil.

55 years ago, Apollo 10's crew turned the airwaves blue

Re: In some ways, we haven't progressed much

What towering achievements, the Mercury and Apollo programmes. Hats off (posthumously) to all involved.

Don't forget Gemini in-between, which pioneered docking between spacecraft which was a crucial prerequisite for the moon landings.

With ransomware whales becoming so dominant, would-be challengers ask 'what's the point?'

Ban crypto currencies and...

...bye bye ransomware affiliate business model.

It really is as simple as that.

Intel, AMD take a back seat as Qualcomm takes center stage in Microsoft's AI PC push

Re: ARM Desktop?

I'd like to see an ARM desktop system (again #RISC_OS), but I wouldn't want to cripple it with Windows.

Google takes shots at Microsoft for shoddy security record with enterprise apps

Re: Google, android has 99% of mobile malware

As opposed to Microsoft who's main Windows product doesn't just lend itself, but is actual malware.

And only getting worse Giving Windows total recall of everything a user does is a privacy minefield

MX Linux updates Libretto, belts out 23.3, based on Debian 12.5

Pi 5

I must give it a try on a Pi 5, as the latest Raspbian (not that it is called that any more) Bookworm is a horrible experience out of the box. The networking setup has all changed and it uses Wayland by default. Even with that disabled I couldn't get it to install the Mate desktop, or even change to the correct resolution.

If MX works well, it will be a bit easier than the solution I went with; which was to first take a Pi 4 running 32 bit Bullseye, create a new card containing 64 bit Bullseye, install all the same packages and manually copy across all the configuration from the 32 bit version - so essentially what an in-place 32 bit to 64 upgrade would do if it was supported. You can then ignoring the dire warnings from the Pi factory and do an in-place upgrade to Bookworm, following one of the handy guides on the internet. You then have a Bookworm that still has all the same networking and graphics setup as Bullseye, but you can now put the card in the Pi 5 and it runs great how a Pi should.

Qualcomm warms bed for Linux on Arm PCs

The Raspberry Pi is a different kettle of fish to the Qualcomm SOCs, as its actually the GPU which loads a kernel image for the CPU to run.

Cybersec chiefs team up with insurers to say 'no' to ransomware bullies

The phenomena doesn't stop until insurers crytpo are is banned from to prevent paying.

FTFY

Telegram CEO calls out rival Signal, claiming it has ties to US government

Re: “ Again, we've reached out for comment from Telegram and Signal”

You do where he is these days?

Hubble Space Telescope hasn't had any visitors for 15 years

Re: Not just the ailing components

NASA was offered an unused KH-11 which is a Hubble based spy satellite, if they wanted it, so there would be no need to refurbish Hubble. The KH-11 would need new instruments, corrected optics and launching, so by no means cheap, but certainly not as much as starting from scratch.

Starlink suffers 'degraded service' from solar storm but emerges intact

Re: War. Famine.

Farmers managed to plough in straight lines, before GPS and with no need to sextants.

US, China agree to meet in Switzerland to discuss most pressing issue of all: AI use

Re: Learning process/power off button

Most technologies don't keep following an exponential development curve, or even a linear one. Long term you tend to get an S curve, exponential initially, then fairly linear, and finally flattening off to maturity. The current 'AI' party trick is very much based on throwing ever more resources at the problem, rather than any great advance in the underlying computer technology, and is therefore unsustainable. We are already seeing diminishing returns from larger model sizes.

OpenAI insists it's not launching a search engine nor GPT-5 on Monday

Crush AI

Lets hope that if OpenAI tries to get into search, google uses their might to crush this insidious content scraping AI nonsense.

SpaceX set to literally rock Florida with more and bigger Starship launches

Re: What's the margin for error?

Are they in need of a good kitchen knife on Mars?

Look to the skies this weekend as solar storms strike Earth

Re: Portsmouth Harbour

I was just along the coast on Hayling Island, and the sight was spectacular.

Stack Overflow simply bans folks who don't want their advice used to train AI

Re: There are people who do it for money

Rarely do you get some much absence of clue in just one place.

Experimental remix finally brings the former Unity 8 back to Ubuntu

Reinstall one last time

as with many of the desktop remixes, for now upgrading from that older version isn't recommended

If you are going to have to reinstall, make it to a distro that supports upgrading, because they b*ll*xed up things replacing packages with snaps.

And I'm not even mentioning hamburgers.

Dell to color-code staff based on how hybrid they really are in RTO push

In the same way that Zoom don't believe in their own product either.

BASICally still alive: Classic language celebrates 60 years with new code and old quirks

Re: BBC Basic

BCD was very useful for calculating values to display on the screen in decimal, without having to do any dividing by 10 on a CPU without a divide instruction.

Starlink geofence appears to have some gaping holes

Re: Another headache in the making

Starlink should ask John Deere about how to do it, as they managed to brick a load of tractors stolen from occupied Ukraine which turned up in Chechnya.

.

Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, literally, something else

My parents could only afford to buy me an Electron, and I was disappointed it was slower than a BBC Micro in the high resolution modes, so while my BBC owning friends wrote programs in BASIC, I had to learn 6502 assembler to get sufficient speed. This really helped in my first job during university where I happened to see the boss of another department struggling to get get his BASIC code on a BBC Master (the successor to the BBC B) fast enough to sample an eddy current probe detecting cracks in an axle stub mounted on an old record desk turntable, it couldn't keep up with a whole revolution at 33 rpm, and he was due to demo it to Ford the next day. I had a Master 128 myself by then, so I volunteered to take it home overnight and rewrite it in assembler. First thing the next morning I tried it out, and it kept up at 33rpm, and 45rpm, it even managed 78rpm (I said the desk was old). The demo to Ford when well, the boss was elated, and I was promptly moved from the messing around with dirty bits of power station department, to the writing software for the non-destructive test instrument department. After the job I dropped the Physics course, switched to UCL to do computer science (projects all written on an Archimedes) and software engineering has been my career ever since.

Google pulls RISC-V support from generic Android kernel

China can, whenever it wants, stop paying ARM for licenses and still crank out as many ARM chips as they want.

I think they already tried that when the Chinese join venture with ARM went rogue.

Tesla maps out new territory in China with Baidu deal

One way?

GCJ-02, which can convert WGS-84 coordinates into BD-09 but not vice versa.

How on earth can you have a coordinate systems which cannot be converted bi-directionally?

Tech industry sheds some light on the planet's situation via LinkedIn

Being an IBM spin-off I'm sure they are doing their bit for the planet by recycling the over 40's into Soylent Green.

China to launch sample return mission to the far side of the Moon – maybe next week

Re: Shambles

Scoping up any random bit of Mars 'dirt' and bringing it back might be a propaganda victory for the Chinese, but the real scientific value lies in returning the carefully selected rock samples extracted by Perseverance.

Ford's BlueCruise driving assistant probed by US watchdog after deaths

Re: I don't care if it is "hands free"

It's performing the mundane tasks which keeps up your level of concentration - the less you have to do the less engaged you are.

BTW: If you really are using half your cognitive ability to maintain speed and stay in lane, you should serious consider giving up driving for your own safety, and those around you.

TikTok ban could escalate US-China trade war, ex-White House CIO tells The Reg

Re: Who will actually lose out

Say no to Vertical Video Syndrome https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dechvhb0Meo