Posts by druck

LinkedIn lays off nearly 700 staff, engineers to suffer the most

AI is completely adequate...

...to drive the low quality spamfest that Linked In is now, so who needs employees.

As it prepares to abandon its on-prem server products, Atlassian is content. Users? Not so much

Re: Reasonable Compromise

You really think stand-alone Office has any future?

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Re: Is anyone surprised?

2038 isn't the UNIX 32 bit time roll over, that isn't until 2106. 2038 is when it overflows a signed 32 bit integer and then becomes negative. Some code which checks for differences between clock values will still cope, but plenty of other code is expected to have issues, ranging from displaying dates before 1970 to failing completely.

GNOME developer proposes removing the X11 session

Tit for tat

X11 has been receiving less and less testing.

And coincidentally Gnome is receiving less and less using.

We have been defaulting to the wayland session since 2016 and it's about time we drop the x11 session completely.

Where as we dropped Gnome completely a long time ago.

Hell no, we won’t pay, says Microsoft as Uncle Sam sends $29B bill for back taxes

Re: It is sad it is taking such a massive case

By god you will find out the hard way that the average Jim-Bob is far crazier than anyone who has managed to get themsleves elected, Trump included.

All the psychosis, none of the charisma.

Re: It is sad it is taking such a massive case

No this is exactly the point, any form of conscription is going to give you a majority of people who are unqualified and uninterested in what they have been drafted in to, whether it is jury service, military service or politics. You might not like the sort of people who want to become politicians, but at least they want to do it, and learn how to be successful in it.

Re: It is sad it is taking such a massive case

I've actually thought about having a lottery system for things like serving in state and federal legislatures. Sort of like jury duty, you can be tapped to serve a term in the state or federal legislature.

That was a scary enough seeing someone's freedom in the hands of a typical jury, and running the country this way would be a disaster. The majority of the jurors did not want to be there, did not listen to the testimony, had no understanding of the law, were not interested in the case apart from making idle gossip, and wanted to do anything but come to a decision. Out of each dozen, there would be one or at best two people willing to stand up and argue for their point of view, and after very little persuasion the rest were happy to go along with the dominant person, just so they could get out of there and go back to their normal lives.

Those dominant people often go to be politicians, but at least they have to argue their case against similar strong personality types with differing views, rather going unchallenged by unwilling conscripted participants.

Brit competition regulator will make or break Vodafone and Three union

Arquiva have bought up thousands of the mast sites, so that's the direction it is already heading.

EU consultation on future telecoms cools on having big tech pay for network builds

ASUS routers have offered per service and per device usage data (in nice pie and bar charts) for over 10 years. Spending a couple more quid on one of them rather than the standard ISP's P.O.S would vastly improve the service for everyone.

Fujitsu, RIKEN open Japan's first superconducting quantum 'puter to eggheads

This stuff doesn't work, and will never work, no matter how much error correction it has. The desperation is obvious when they have to start throwing AI in to the mix too.

AMD graphics card users report gremlins with Windows 11

Re: Will no one just fess up?

It doesn't even qualify for the tag of alpha.

Feds hopelessly behind the times on ransomware trends in alert to industry

Re: Who enabled ransomware on your computer?

M..., Mi..., Mic..., no sorry just on the tip on my tongue, you'll have to remind me.

Nuclear-powered datacenters: What could go wrong?

Re: Nuclear fanboys keep looking for a business case for SMRs

However they have also found it much harder, slower, and more expensive than expected. They have not given up, but they have slowed down as the economics in China are still not so great. A billion dollars spent on wind or solar gives more power, and sooner, even in CN.

When you can continue to build coal plants with no opposition from your own populace and to ignore international agreements, of course the economics of nuclear don't look as good.

iPhone 15 is too hot to handle – and not in any good way

Re: Not a new problem

I had this problem when testing video conferencing software, the phones were on stands on the desk during the call which lasted almost an hour, but did I get a nasty surprise trying to pick one up after, luckily I didn't drop it from too high.

Chinese snoops stole 60K State Department emails in that Microsoft email heist

A good solution is not to rely on anyone's software stack to protect key information, critical keys should never be used outside of a Hardware Security Module.

It's not just Microsoft's internal data which has been exposed in crash dumps, Azure VMs falling over have revealed other clients data in logs.

French monopoly cops raid Nvidia office in cloud probe

Jealousy

If it's tech company doing well, and it's not European, it must be abusing a monopoly.

Musk, Yaccarino contradict each other on status of X's election integrity team

Re: Hey Elon

I must have missed which general rule of law the Russians were applying to the civilians of Bucha.

Israel and Italy have cheapest mobile data out of 237 countries

I'm sure these swipe type keyboards use machine learning - to make themselves worse. Every one I've tried has started off pretty good and gets less and less accurate the more I use it.

CMA says new Microsoft-Activision deal addresses concerns

Re: 40 years and the spots wont change

Still one X-box fanboy in the house?

40 years and the spots wont change

Just watch Microsoft run rings around the regulators once the ink is dry on the paper, just as they've done with every other attempt to curb their monopolistic practices.

The alternative to stopping climate change is untested carbon capture tech

Re: Carbon capture isn't the only solution

To reduce energy from the sun, you only need to cover 1% of the Sun, not the 1% of the entire sky.

NYC rights groups say no to grocery store spycams and snooping landlords

You do make me laugh.

Ubuntu and Fedora clash in beta race, but who wears GNOME better?

Sounds like it's time to try something else, start with Liam's favourite of XFCE. I'm sticking with MATE, because.

Bids for ISS demolition rights are now open, NASA declares

RUS-- ISS++

The oldest and most decrepit parts of the ISS are the two Russian modules, if they were replaced with a new propulsion module the rest of it could last well past 2030. I'm sure there are commercial operators who could make money out of it if NASA are no longer interested / bleed dry by Artemis.

Samsung wants to push CAMM format into memory mainstream

Works properly if you click on it to embiggen.

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

Gloucester being next to the Severn river, which funnels rainfall from a good chunk of Wales (not known for its dryness), is tidal from the city southwards and features a regular large bore.

So flooding isn't a risk, it's an inevitability.

US military F-35 readiness problems highlighted in aptly timed report

Re: Too many cooks spoil the broth

The engines were prone to in-flight flame/outs/engine stalls, and the whole aircraft had a tendency to flat-spin.

Wow, you've watched Top Gun, and that is pretty much the only fact we can draw from your post.

UK-US data deal could hinge on fate of legal challenges to EU arrangement

Re: ....and some more for "woke" folk to chew on.....

Wow, well done for posting two lots of meaningless gibberish to the comments. Particularly as you don't even the braincells to use pre tags to stop it coming out double spaced.

ESA gets the job of building Europe's secure satcomms network

The next EU boondoggle

I see this being right up there with Galileo as value for money of EU tax payers.

Colleges snub Turnitin's AI-writing detector over fears it'll wrongly accuse students

Re: Advice

It's possible AI could be trained on draft versions of essays so it could mimic the process of development and refinement, but at the moment if you can show how your drafts have evolved in manner consistent with human authoring, you should be safe.

Advice

My advice to students is to save and keep copies of your work in progress every few hours, so if some flaky software accuses of using AI, you can show how your work was created every step of the way, with all the changes and corrections you have made.

Amazon 'protects' against junk AI e-books by limiting author-bots to three a day

where does it leave the original 1% of good stuff?

1% today, 0.1% tomorrow and 0.01% the day after.

Signal adopts new alphabet jumble to protect chats from quantum computers

Re: "an effort to keep encrypted Signal chat messages protected from any future quantum computers"

But in the mean time there are plenty of snake oil salesmen trying to flog post quantum encryption algorithms which have not been proven to be as secure as existing algorithms in use today.

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Have you ever driven a real car?

And a 2CV actually sends the power to the correct pair of wheels!

You forgot the joke icon.

Russian allegedly smuggled US weapons electronics to Moscow

Re: Why bother?

That would be a mildly amusing comment if the missiles weren't killing people every night.

Re: Why bother?

Russian heavy bombers daren't get closer than the Caspian sea to chuck cruise missiles at Ukraine before running away - fucking cowards the lot of them.

BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year

Re: Just switch it off .... no one will notice .... :)

When I was a child we visited my grandmother and in the evening sat down to watch the TV, but she told us it had broken a few months ago, she didn't watch much it anyway so wasn't bothered. It was only when I was older and remembered her TV couldn't get BBC2, so it must have been a 405 line VHF set (BBC2 was only on 625 line UHF), and that time we went around was just they switched off the old VHF service.

I wonder how many grandmothers will find their 3G mobile no longer works, just think it's broken, and probably not say anything because they don't use it much.

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

Re: On false equivalences

Yes, things such an a whatever-they-were-called-before-ActiveX text grid with build in edit control, easy to use but cost quite a bit up front and then wanted a per copy royalty on top - so wrote my own instead.

These days you can teach old tech a bunch of new tricks

Re: Windows ME

I prefer Windows Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, and I can pronounce it too.

SK hynix says no Huawei its memory should be in Chinese wonder-phone

Re: Can anyone tell if the Mate 60 Pro will work in Canada ?

Oh the naivety. You might never intend to go to China, but China might come to you. If the data they obtain from a compromised device indicates you are working in a particular industry or belong to certain political organisations, you may well be coerced into furthering the objectives of the CCP.

GNOME 45 formalizes extensions module system

A desktop...

...written in Javascript - no, just no.

Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia

Re: The report is not completely accurate

More importantly warships have CIWS (Close in Weapon Systems) to shoot out of the water any small high speed vessels which try to approach. There are videos of the Ukrainian drones being actively controlled to try to avoid the incoming fire, usually unsuccessfully given the potency of such systems. The successful attacks have been when they haven't been spotted until its too late.

Target what? There are lots of ships in a port, and they tend to move around too. Without very sophisticated autonomous weaponry, which Ukraine does not posses, you need a live feed to identify between warships and other vessels, and provide terminal guidance so the small explosive charge is detonated location which will cause the greatest damage.

If you like to play along with the illusion of privacy, smart devices are a dumb idea

Re: Resistance is futile

There still has to be an antenna somewhere, and the car isn't going to know if has no signal due to lack of an antenna or if it's driving through in one of the many not spots around the country.

Microsoft to shield paid-up Copilot customers from any AI copyright brawls it starts

Bad, bad, bad

So a small independent developer who finds that his code has been ripped off by someone using Co-pilot, and asserts his valid copyright claim, now finds himself up against Microsoft's army of lawyers operating in every jurisdiction?

Microsoft: China stole secret key that unlocked US govt email from crash debug dump

No hardware, no secuirity.

The key had no place being in a production environment no matter how isolated. Any key which Windows (or other OSs (but especially Windows)) can access is a key that will be leaked, one day somehow. Important signing keys should only exist inside hardware security modules, which produces and validates the tokens.

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Re: Great job!

Wilko goes bust, you shop at an alternative such as B&M.

Your bank goes bust, you don't get your salary, your bills don't paid, and your mortgage gets bought from the administrator by some glorified loan shark who immediately doubles the interest rate. Saving the bank isn't about saving it's employees, it's about saving you.

Vodafone and Amazon shoot for the stars while Kuiper satellites remain grounded

Re: "21 launched on a Falcon 9 at the weekend"

Jeff didn't like that last bit.