Posts by druck

Windows boss takes on taskbar turmoil, pledges to 'make Start menu great again'

Re: Do what you like but give options

Linux Mint is waiting with open arms. The start menu in Mate or Cinnamon is instantly familiar to any former XP or 7 user.

Calculating Pi in the sky: Axiom Space plans to launch 'orbital datacenter'

Re: I wonder

In a hard disk the head is kept a small distance away from the surface by aerodynamic forces created by the gas moving with the spinning disk. In a vacuum there would be nothing to keep the head from hitting the disk, which would not be good.

Re: I wonder

Helium filled drives might operate in a vacuum - for a while - Helium likes to escape.

Windows 12: Savior of PC makers, or just an apology for Windows 11?

Documenting wrongness doesn't make it any less wrong!

Is that the same Windows calculator that gives different results to the an equation depending on the mode?

Try 3 + 4 * 5 in each mode, and bonus points for knowing which answer is correct.

Formal ban on ransomware payments? Asking orgs nicely to not cough up ain't working

Re: A simpler solution…

Not just bitcoin, ban any crypto currency.

Apart from a massive investment bubble for the hard of thinking, the only real use for it is to transfer the proceeds of crime to other countries.

Driverless cars swerve traffic tickets in California even if they break the law

Re: How to improve AI training in one easy step

Many countries have fines proportional to the drivers income, for driverless cars that should be the total income of the manufacturer. That would either get them to shape up rapidly, or get the damn things off the road pronto.

War of the workstations: How the lowest bidders shaped today's tech landscape

Re: Part of the problem

ARM actually made chips which could run Java bytecode with the Jazelle extension, it was used in lots of phones in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Asahi's Fedora remix dazzles and baffles on Apple Silicon

Re: Why?

Linux Mint is x86 only (64 bit x86 at that now) so wont tun on the Pi, so I assume you mean the Mint desktop on either Raspbian (Raspberry Pi OS) or the Ubuntu Mate edition of the Pi.

Re: Win? Win Who?

The Windows key is called "Super" in *nix land, short for superfluous.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto stolen after Ledger code poisoned

Re: Money by a long way

Is that right Mr Cryptoschill?

Perhaps you would like to give us the proportion of ransomware and other internet extortion rackets that demand payment in crypto currency.

Microsoft seizes websites used to sell phony email accounts to Scattered Spider and other crims

No it's Microsoft desperate to be seen to be doing something, instead of tackling the real problem which is their eternally insecure software.

Ofcom proposes ban on UK telcos making 'inflation-linked' price hikes mid-contract

Re: Shocked, of Hamel Hampsted

O2 wont tell you when your contract has expired and let you stay paying whatever.

If you buy your phone directly from O2, they drop the price automatically as soon as your phone is paid off.

If you buy from someone like Carphone Warehouse, you'll be paying the higher price for years until you eventually realise and cancel the contract.

Raspberry Pi OS goes goth

Re: Why dark mode

I go for not just dark mode, but darker mode with proper black backgrounds. I also use the DarkReader plug-in for both Firefox and Chrome/Chromium, whilst by default that will give a mushy grey on grey you can set it to use a brightness of -20 and a contrast of +20 to give nice crisp white on black pages, particularly with The Register.

Microsoft's code name for 64-bit Windows was also a dig at rival Sun

How about some specific links?

Microsoft issues deadline for end of Windows 10 support – it's pay to play for security

Re: Meanwhile... Landfill operators... Start your engines

I had a 10 year old i3 laptop running Windows 10 which with only 4GB was so slow it was only fit for the skip now, never mind the Windows 11 upgrade which it could never run.

I quick install of Linux Mint, and it's perfectly adequate for web browsing and watching videos.

Microsoft fixes Copilot multi-monitor issues in Windows 11 update

Re: Multi-monitor explains it

Just how fucked up does the OS have to be that an "AI" assistant application wont work with multiple monitors?

Hershey phishes! Crooks snarf chocolate lovers' creds

Re: Hershey's?

Chocolate is poisonous to dogs, and I suspect Hersheys is too.

China's first undersea datacenter sinks – as planned

China Television reports that the project will sink 60,000 unspecified computers that will together have the capacity of a supercomputer. The machines will be cooled by seawater and operate in an environment free of oxygen and dust.

The modules have a lifespan of 25 years and rely on a shore station for power and connectivity.

In 25 years time, it will have the capacity of a smartphone.

Bitcoin's thirst for water is just as troubling as its energy appetite

Re: Bitcoin, the perfect example

No, it's go nothing to do with maths, BitCoin's value is the perception of the worth of a finite resource, or to use a word you may understand; greed. It similar principle to the value given to gold but that also has real uses, so far more like 17th century tulip bulb bubble and every other commodity fad that comes crashing down when a small percentage of the traders finally see sense.

Cinnamon and KDE sync version numbers in desktop sibling rivalry

Re: Stark differences in DE

I think this is also why Gnome got the $1 million grant because they are more likely to use it for accessibility and that will trickle down to all gnome-based DE's like Cinnamon, Mate etc

I'm not sure how much will trickle down from developers of Gnome 4 to those who deliberately use the older (and the older the better) versions of Gnome.

The Wayland session is not yet feature-complete

I have never seen a mention of Wayland that isn't rapidly followed by "not yet feature-complete".

HP printer software turns up uninvited on Windows systems

There needs to be a big sign:-

THIS IS MICROSOFT's COMPUTER, WE DO WHAT WE WANT WITH IT.

Don't like that? Try Linux.

Steam client drops support on macOS, but adds it on Linux

Re: The entire x86-32 platform is declining

There were plenty of 32 bit only Atom powered Netbooks around in the early 2010's, and even when they started using 64 bit ATOMs some still had BIOSs which only allowed 32 bit OSs.

But with any Atom 64 bit OSs were more crippled than 32 bit, due to the stingy 2GB maximum RAM.

Regulator says stranger entered hospital, treated a patient, took a document ... then vanished

Re: Pardon?

magine a scenario when someone determined breaks in, goes to CCTV room and politely asks the security person to turn cameras off and erase the recordings. If they are unable to do it, then their life is at risk.

You have a switch labelled CCTV OFF which turns all the monitors off in the control room, but leaves the CCTV recording, and sets off an alarm in the local police station.

Experienced Copilot help is hard to find, warns Microsoft MVP

Since when...

...have Microsoft MVPs been any help with anything?

Leader of pro-Russia DDoS crew Killnet 'unmasked' by Russian state media

Re: Axis nations

It's not the WWII Axis powers, but George W. Bush's Axis of Evil, which was originally Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, but Russia has more than earned itself a place on that list.

Crypto crasher Do Kwon's extradition approved, but destination is unclear

Terraform Labs promised investors that its so-called "stablecoin" Terra USD and similar Luna tokens were safe investments that would not crash

You would have to be a lunatic to beleive that.

Data-destroying defect found after OpenZFS 2.2.0 release

Checksums

I'm surprised that file level checksums aren't automatically enabled for any experimental feature such as this, so problems can be detected immediately, and eliminating the risk of undetected corruption reaching backups.

User read the manual, followed instructions, still couldn't make 'Excel' work

The very first mouse I had did actually have the buttons on the front and the cable on the back coming out towards you, as it plugged in to the user port underneath the keyboard of the BBC Micro, rather than a case under the monitor as on all later machines.

Greenpeace calls out tech giants for carbon footprint fumble

Re: When was winter ever an issue for wind farms?

Winter is, precisely, the period of the year when the yield of wind farms is at it's highest.

Financial yield perhaps, as they get paid when the wind blows and they generate electricity, they get paid when the wind blows too hard and they don't generate electricity, and they get paid when the wind doesn't blow enough and they don't generate electricity. The latter being their favourite time, as less break then, and you don't notice the 25% which never seem spin anyway.

North Korea makes finding a gig even harder by attacking candidates and employers

Re: How Many Gullible Programmers *ARE* There in the Wild?

The git clone should be OK, but don't do a make without checking the makefile carefully. Better still have a sandboxed VM ready for any interview tasks.

Inside Denmark’s hell week as critical infrastructure orgs faced cyberattacks

Re: saving money

But then there is the USAsians insisting you will destroy your engine unless you change the oil every 5000 miles like it is still the 1950s.

Not distracting from the point about security updates which it really is worth doing as often as is practicable.

Tesla, Musk likely aware of Autopilot deficiencies behind Florida fatality, says judge

Re: Cross traffic?

The detachment from reality beggars belief in both cases.

But it's not their reality - if their systems doesn't work correctly, they are not affected apart from a few $ off the bottom line if they lose the court case.

You on the other hand die.

How to give Windows Hello the finger and login as someone on their stolen laptop

Re: So the only move to win this game

No, the way it should be done is that the sensor produces the hash, which is matched by the TPM chip against a previous stored (and irretrievable) value.

Will anybody save Linux on Itanium? Absolutely not

Re: StrongARM/Xscale

The only Itanium systems I've come across were so slow, you could probably emulate them faster on the ARM chip in a Raspberry Pi 5.

OpenAI meltdown: How could Microsoft have let this happen after betting so many billions?

Re: Or...

Or more pertinently Sendo - they developed Winows Phone and just before launch Microsoft pulled the rug, put them out of business and got all the technology they developed for nothing.

THEN a few years later their schill did the burning platforms speech at Nokia, that lead to it being acquired and an ultimately destroyed by the incompetence of the borg.

What do you mean your exaflop is better than mine?

Re: How many values in FP8?

Yes I was just looking at that, say you want to start with a value of 100 and add 1 to it ten times, you would expect to get 110.

The closest number 100 in FP8 is 104, and if you add 1 to it 10 times you get 104, as increments of 1 are too small to be represented at that exponent.

If you add the ten 1s together first you get 10 in FP8, and add that to 104 you get 112, as that is the next representable value in FP8.

So there is a whole heap of wrong there.

Yes, pretty much every SATA SSD I've used can hit around the 600-650MiB/sec mark.

When new, after a few years nearer 450MiB/s.

Fired OpenAI boss Sam Altman may join Microsoft

Re: Resignation Threat Letter

The whole thing stinks, and as you say, who looks to benefit.

Never forget the dirty tricks that sank Sendo and handled Microsoft all the Windows phone development for nothing.

Why have just one firewall when you can fire all the walls?

Re: "could hear the telescope motors start humming"

So, that is proof that 1) the programmer didn't bother with actually checking inputs, and 2) zero quality control or even proper testing.

Sounds very much like software written by scientists rather than engineers.

Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo sign up for $42 billion scheme to make kit in India

Stable my ar$e

"Stablecoins – if well regulated – can potentially play a useful role as digital money alongside CBDCs and tokenised bank liabilities," declared Menon.

They are an open invitation to speculation, think bouncing the pound out of the ERM except far easier and less risky.

Apple's quest for modem independence from Qualcomm is going nowhere fast

And then you still have to hold it right.

Scaleway Ampere servers promise AI smarts without breaking the bank

Arse backwards comparison

Wittich claimed that running OpenAI's generative speech recognition model, Whisper, on Ampere's 128-core Altra Max processor consumes 3.6 times less power per inference than operating the same on an Nvidia A10 Tensor Core GPU.

Again with this arse backwards style of comparisons, is part of the hideous Americanization of this once great site?

It should be; an Nvidia A10 Tensor Core GPU consumes 3.6 times more power per inference than Ampere's 128-core Altra Max processor.

Copilot coming to Windows 10 to help navigate the OS's twilight years

Re: Plan to slow Windows 10?

I've got an 10 year old 11.3" i3 laptop I use to read BBC News and The Register while watching the TV in the living room, it was originally Windows 8.1 but upgraded it to 10 when that went out of support. It has become so unusable slow even on those relatively simple websites I was going to chuck it, but I put Linux Mint on it, and now runs at the same speed as it did new, if not faster. It only has 4GB of memory and it usually had a commit of 9.4GB on Windows, under Linux there only a few 100KB in swap - that's the difference not having a tone of shite in the OS makes, and would be far worse with AI shite. That was my last remaining Windows system, and good riddance.

South Korea opens the door for robots to roam among pedestrians

Re: Insane lack of restrictions

The solution to police not doing their jobs, isn't to allow robots to start damaging people too.

Amazon bankrolling industry lobbying against Microsoft Azure should surprise no one

Re: most of the time Azure is the better option

Whoever downvoted the above, really does have their head in the clouds...

...and Microsoft's hand up their arse.

Software is listening for the options you want it to offer, and it's about time

Re: Not just Apple

That's for putting in the drawer and never using again, as luckily they still supply a proper remote with lots of buttons on it.

HOWEVER, my Samsung Q90 puts up a message asking why aren't you using the magic remote about 20 seconds after switching on, and during the 10 seconds it is on screen, you can't use the standard remote - WTF?

Control Altman delete: OpenAI fires CEO, chairman quits

Re: Scandalous revelations coming out in 3...2...1

That's what I thought, they'll be looking to take control of the company on the cheap, or put it out of business and run off with the technology as they did with Sendo.

Bug hunters on your marks: TETRA radio encryption algorithms to enter public domain

Re: Quantum-proof ?

The post quantum snake-oil salesmen have jumped on this bandwagon too.