Posts by druck

NetBSD 10 proves old tech can still kick apps and take names three decades later

I want a 64 bit RISC OS with preemption and multi-core SMP, but can still run all the 32 bit cooperative multitasking programs transparently on the same desktop. I don't think I'm getting any time soon though.

Tesla asks shareholders to reinstate Musk's voided $56B pay package

Re: Fuck that!

If Musk is there more, he might find the crayons again and draw something worse than the cyber truck.

Crypto conferences liquidated after biblical flooding in Dubai

Ban Crypto...

...and eliminate 99% of cyber ransom and other online fraud, help the planet by avoiding the equivalent of burning billions of tons of coal.

What is the downside, seriously?

Whistleblower cries foul over alleged fuselage gaps in Boeing 787 Dreamliner

Flaps in aircraft are commonly driven from a single motor via shafts to both wings, rather than individual motors or hydraulics, as the consequences asymmetric deployment are non recoverable.

Some smart meters won't be smart at all once 2/3G networks mothballed

British Gas new computer fsck up

British Gas are probably blaming 1st gen smart meters stopping working due to 2G/3G being phased out, but it is not, it's their own fsck up. I don't know if it is intensional or not though.

Despite having been built in 2017 our house has an 1st gen smart meter. It worked for first year we were with British Gas, then didn't for other suppliers as expected, when we came back to British Gas the meter started being smart again. However about 2 years ago British Gas upgraded their computer system which resulted in not being able to log in for several weeks, then we found they couldn't read the smart meter any more, and they started emailing us every month for readings. Now they are bugging us to upgrade to a 2nd Gen meter, normally using an unintelligible overseas call centre which drops the call half way through.

BTW: We are nowhere near ready to turn off 3G anyway, I was trying to read The Register on the train from Waterloo to the Portsmouth on Monday and it spent most of the time on 2G (so slow it might as well not be connected) or 3G (will display a page eventually), only patchy 4G and no sign of any 5G on O2.

Latest AMD Ryzen Pro chips are similar silicon, more smarts

I'll pick something that doesn't waste silicon on FP16 or FP8 which are useless for anything other than 'AI'.

SIM swap crooks solicit T-Mobile US, Verizon staff via text to do their dirty work

Re: Take the money

The have the cell Co's employees details, which no doubt includes their home address. You don't think they might come around and ask for their money back, nicely if course.

Open source versus Microsoft: The new rebellion begins

Re: EOL of Windows 10 makes choice easier

I wonder why Microsoft seems to spend more time looking for bugs in rivals products than they do their own.

You really are coming up with a lot of excuses for sticking with the borg, work as a Window's admin by any chance?

Re: The 3 assistants with fantastic people skills who effing hate computers

Are you seriously telling me you couldn't set a shortcut of ctrl+alg+g to a browser on Linux?

Re: Fingers crossed

I just can't get over the boat that's gone in to so many window mangers that KDE has become a relative lightweight.

Re: I wish them luck

Of course it is.

75% of enterprise coders will use AI helpers by 2028. We didn't say productively

Tl;dr

AI helps shit coders produce shit code faster.

Apple's failure to duck UK antitrust probe could bring £785M windfall for devs

Competition amongst devs should lower the price of apps, as long as the app store owner isn't allowed to bar having more than one of the same type of app, as Apple do.

Space Force boss warns 'the US will lose' without help from Musk and Bezos

Re: Just what we want

An idea would be to pack your satellites with 100Kg of ball bearings, so even if they are destroyed by accurate kinetic missiles, it will cause Kessler Syndrome anyway.

US broadband internet: Now with mandatory 'nutrition' labels

Monthly Rental?

In civilised nations you get the modem for free, and often the WiFi extender too. Even if you didn't you could buy your own and be up before two years.

Hailo's latest AI chip shows up integrated NPUs and sips power like fine wine

Running AI models on a laptop is as sensible as fitting a semi-tailer hitch to a bicycle.

PC shipments up for first quarter thanks to AI, say analysts

Re: expected demand is already pushing up the price of DRAM

No, it will be wasting a lot of silicon on FP8 performance, which is bugger all use for anything else. But at least it will have enough memory to last you through a few OS upgrades.

Post Office slapped down for late disclosure of documents in Horizon scandal inquiry

Re: her credibility for preaching & giving sermons on Christian values

Maybe we should have MPs on a jury duty style system?

Having served on several juries, I've seen that 12 people who have been pulled away from their lives to attend court every day, do not want to be there, and have no knowledge of how things work, is not the best way of doing anything never mind running the country. Generally one or two people with forceful personalities will come to the fore, and the others will go along them them just to get out of there quickly, and it wouldn't be long before you found yourself in a dictatorship.

MPs ask: Why is it so freakin' hard to get AI giants to pay copyright holders?

Wow

Following last nights US House mulls forcing AI makers to reveal use of copyrighted training data

A rare bit of joined up thinking on this side of the pond too!

US House mulls forcing AI makers to reveal use of copyrighted training data

Great news, but..

This is the best news I've heard on AI so far, but I'm pretty sure it will never be passed. The companies who have already invested billions in AI based on scraped and stolen data, wont hesitate to spend some more on lobbying against it.

Engine cover flies from Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 during takeoff

Re: Video looks like a landing not a takeoff

One of the interesting 'historical' features of the 737 is that it can't dump fuel so you either have to fly around ion circles for a few hours - not recommended if you suspect you have a bit of wing missing, or you land overweight and risk damaging some expensive concrete

You've got the last bit a bit backwards, a 737 isn't going to be too heavy for any runway long enough for it to land on as, but landing overweight may cause damage the landing gear or buckle the airframe.

Head of Israeli cyber spy unit exposed ... by his own privacy mistake

Re: "9% of them do so within three days"

It's not just cheating at games. I worked for a company making screen readers about 15 years ago, and the only way it could gather the information it needed to be able to describe and navigate another application's windows with sufficient detail was to install a DLL in it's process and read from it's memory. Terrible for security, but a god send for visually impaired users, and the reason why screen readers are not nearly as good on other platforms.

Want to keep Windows 10 secure? This is how much Microsoft will charge you

None of the dozens so far have.

Intel's foundry business bled $7B in 2023 with more to come

Re: Missed the mobile market

While I agree with you they made a massive mistake selling off their ARM business, there is no guarantee it would have given them much of a foothold in mobile - if you consider technical merit rather than marketing muscle.

The DEC engineers did a fantastic job to take the low power 40MHz ARM7, add Alpha cache technology and create the 230MHz StrongARM, but left in droves when Intel took over. Intel's development was the XScale, they upped the clock speed to 400 to 600 MHz but it was the worst ARM core ever produced, a long pipeline full of instruction barriers and extra cycles all over the place, pathetic memory bandwidth, and an errata that was longer than the ARM7s entire reference manual - basically the Pentium 4 of the ARM world. ARM very quickly regained the lead in performance with the ARM11, and has never produced anything so inelegant or broken.

But where did those DEC engineers go you ask? The answer is PA-Semi which was subsequently bought by Apple, and their magic is now behind the extraordinary performance of the M series Apple Silicon.

Google ponders making AI search a premium option

AI - No thanks!

If a premium option will keep AI out of free search, I'm all for it.

German state ditches Windows, Microsoft Office for Linux and LibreOffice

It wont be technical issues which sink this

But the problem of brown envelopes.

And as we know from Bernie Ecclestone, even if caught, the penalty for his sort of behaviour in such jurisdictions, is to give more of the same to court.

Vodafone and Three's UK merger hits regulatory roadblock

Obviously important news

I was surprised walking through town at lunchtime when my 10 years old asked why the Vodafone shop had not been renamed Vodafone Three yet. I 'm not sure how he knew about the merger, as his entire world seems to consist of playing Roblox or Minecraft, and I doubt it was from his 8 year old brother who spends 100% of this time watching game playing videos on YouTube.

P.S. Just tore him away from the computer to ask, and he says he heard in it on breakfast news, I said we didn't watch that today, but he said "oh, it was weeks ago" - mind like a steel trap that one, still hasn't forgotten when I dropped him as a toddler.

Microsoft unbundling Teams is to appease regulators, not give customers a better deal

Don't just consider the cost savings...

...but how grateful your employees will be, when they are no longer forced to use Teams.

There are some alternatives that aren't as hideous to use, so much so, some people even turn their cameras on during video calls!

US House of Reps tells staff: No Microsoft Copilot for you!

There are some "AI" things that are useful, like email spam filters that "learn" and "adapt" to identify likely spam even if it's something it's never encountered before.

You mean like spam assassin did long before AI was a thing?

Malicious xz backdoor reveals fragility of open source

Re: Would This Have Been Caught Sooner In Proprietary Software?

First, getting the job and passing background checks.

You mean actually look at the name on the H-1B visa?

Re: Some OSS development introspection needed

ssh doesn't link to the infected library, it was injected into the process by systemd - and people wonder why it gets such hate.

Microsoft, OpenAI may be dreaming of $100B 5GW AI 'Stargate' supercomputer

All these 100's of billions...

...and you know who has not received a penny?

All the creators of original text, images and video which has been scraped from the internet without permission, circumventing copyright and licencing, and is being exploited for money by the AI companies, Microsoft in particular.

OpenAI claims its software can clone your voice from 15 seconds of you talking

Re: April 1

The article may have been on April 1st, but it is dated after midday GMT+1.

This bit however is pure comedy:-

the biz wants everyone to know it's not going to release this Voice Engine until it can be sure the potential for mischief has been managed

Like if they care, or there is any way to put this back in the box.

AT&T admits massive 70M+ mid-March customer data dump is real though old

Data ageism

It doesn't matter how many years old the data is. If it contains names, dates of birth and social security numbers, it will remain valuable for the lifetimes of the victims.

Thta's regardless of whether they remain AT&T customers or not.

Why Microsoft's Copilot will only kinda run locally on AI PCs for now

Re: Locally..ish?

For Microsoft, meanwhile, shifting more of the AI workload onto customer devices frees up its own resources for other tasks, such as helping train the next OpenAI model or offering it as a cloud API profit.

Microsoft don't reduce the Copilot subscription fee if you are stupid enough to buy more expensive hardware and use your own electricity for the computation, but I'm sure they are grateful for the extra profit.

University of Washington's Workday woes leave research grants in limbo

Re: Workday funny

Well I wouldn't complain too hard about that bug!

Intel's green dream is chips without any dips in Mother Nature's health

Re: Interest

I read an article a couple of years ago about a guy in a garage in California making chips with a feature size of 175 microns.

The venerable 6502 was built on 8 microns, so he would need another 20x improvement to get to a 1975 CPU.

How a single buck bought bragging rights in the battle to port Windows 95 to NT

Re: Vista is a very unfairly maligned OS.

@aerogems if you are wondering why people are downvoting you, it's for nonsence like that.

Re: Nah.

I'm sure a combination of Windows advocacy and complaining about downvotes has nothing to do with you getting more downvotes.

Re: NT 3.51

The pace of development was extremely obvious in those days. Back then when most software was developed it was fine if it was initially unusable slow, as you knew by the time it was finished in a year's time it would run comfortably on current machines.

AI hallucinates software packages and devs download them – even if potentially poisoned with malware

I'd like to remame it lying.

Beijing issues list of approved CPUs – with no Intel or AMD

We should be worried

The FT chatted to some IT shops inside China and they confirmed that they're phasing out items like PCs running Windows, because shop-at-home mandates have taken force.

This is the most concerning news; just think what the Chinese will be able to do once unshackled from the disastrous security vulnerabilities and constant pointless change for the sake of change which Microsoft operating systems inflict on us in the west.

Apple iPhone AI to be powered by Baidu in China, maybe

Re: I assume because Chinese law

China's regulation of AI models is only concerned with political censorship, it could still tell you to drink bleach or any other artificial stupidity.

Crypto wallet providers urged to rethink security as criminals drain them of millions

They seem happy taking the entire bloody lot.

Some of the flaws are so obvious and intractable, the only explanation is they have been designed that way to allow exploitation once enough people have adopted the wallets.

Catch Java 22, available from Oracle for a limited time

Re: Java Is UnbeluckingFievable

Well if you do delete a space Python will tell you as soon as you run it. C/C++/C# will compile happily, but you'll damn well be putting that space back in as the result of a code review, so what have you gained apart from wasting everyone's time?

Re: Java Is UnbeluckingFievable

Python is an awful language, who in their right mind thought spaces should be important?

So you don't think spaces are important? You write your Java/C/C++/C# as one great long line, or lines with no indentation whatsoever, or maybe random indentation just for the hell of it?

Of course you don't (unless you are a complete and utter knob), if you write properly laid out code in other languages following any sensible coding standard, Python is the same just without the curly brackets.

Crypto scams more costly to the US than ransomware, Feds say

You can't...

You can't ban stupidity.

You can't ban criminality.

But you can ban crypto.

AI researchers have started reviewing their peers using AI assistance

Re: Who raised you people?

Is there nothing that can't be turned to shit by AI?

Now even peer reviewed papers are worthless.