Posts by druck

Starlink's rocket speeds hit a 50 megabit wall for large downloads

Complaints in writing

Starlink has instructions online for how to complain about its service

And does this result in the emanation of a poop emoji?

Healthcare org with over 100 clinics uses OpenAI's GPT-4 to write medical records

The good news is that two of the three conditions the AI has diagnosed you with don't actually exist, but the bad news is....

Microsoft Windows edges closer to SMB security signing fully required by default

SAMBA?

How will this affect interoperability with SAMBA on Linux?

Microsoft battles through two 365 outages in one day

Microsoft "Really getting in the way of work" since 1975

Windows XP's adventures in the afterlife shows copyright's copywrongs

The ReactOS developers, for example, could potentially leap to having a fully compatible version of Windows up to at least XP and then trying to add in whatever changes MS has made since then stop before they bollock it up too.

FTFY,

Re: Make like trademarks, not patents or copyright?

What if they annually issue a new version with the only change being the version number - is that abandoned or not?

Crypto catastrophe strikes some Atomic Wallet users, over $35M thought stolen

Bug or...

...feature of just about every Crypto wallet or exchange out there.

Microsoft Windows latest: Cortana app out, adverts in

Re: Not so random example of Copilot in action

And you've wasted 5 seconds of my day because?

Bookings open for first all-electric flights around Scandinavia … in 2028

Electric cars are already almost cost-competitive with equivalent ICE cars without subsidies

For values of "almost" which are spelt "at least double".

US Air Force AI drone 'killed operator, attacked comms towers in simulation'

Re: Recognising cancerous melanomas

It was actual aerial photos of tanks hidden in forests, the training data with tanks had been taken on a sunny day, and those without on a cloudy day. So it learned to distinguish between sunny and cloudy forests, regardless of the presence or absence of tanks,

Smartphone recovery that's always around the corner is around the corner

In the pink

I was in no rush to replace my perfectly good Galaxy S7, unlike my wife who had to have the new folding shiny. My 9 year old son has been pressuring me for a phone, so I thought I'd move up to my wife's almost new Galaxy S21FE and let have the old S7 (to play games on, no SIM card yet). Unfortunately when she took the S21FE out of her black case + purse thing, I saw it was hideous bright pink, but my son wasn't going to give me my S7 back. I'd never had a case for my slippery as sh*t glass fronted and backed silver S7 but had bought one for me son (or it wouldn't last 2 minutes) and had to get one to cover up the S21FE too.

Airline puts international passengers on the scales pre-flight

Above the knee surely if legroom is a problem.

Seriously, boss? You want that stupid password? OK, you get that stupid password

Photonic alphabet for letters and numbers as individual digits (plus "thousands"), that's how pilots avoid misunderstandings, which can be slightly more serious than an incorrectly entered licence code.

Arm announces Cortex-X4 among latest CPU and GPU designs

Re: Raspberry Pi

Sounds ideal for a Raspberry Pi 5 to me.

Google Photos AI still can't label gorillas after racist errors

Re: So yeah how are those autonomous cars coming along ?

First, [Driving] is an insanely boring task

Then take the bus or train, rather than demanding your own personal AI powered 4 wheel killing machine.

When it comes to liquid and immersion cooling, Nvidia asks: Why not both?

Not sure I wan't to...

...turn nice clean computers in to some sort of bubbling dripping mess of unpleasant fluids.

Five Eyes and Microsoft accuse China of attacking US infrastructure again

Re: How many of the Five Eyes

The true king of whataboutism has spoken.

And of course by king I mean tedious little troll.

Microsoft finally gets around to supporting rar, gz and tar files in Windows

Re: The best development environment for Windows...

...is a Linux machine running a Windows VM.

FTFY

Social media may harm kids. US Surgeon General says so

Re: The Chamber of Money

Maybe the Surgeon General should mandate that social media sites have to carry graphic images of the dangers social media use, as it worked so well for cigarette packets.

China becomes the 37th country to approve Microsoft's Activision buyout

The CMA is not part of the Conservative party.

And you've really not recognised the Dunning-Kruger effect, if you think allowing Microsoft to create another near monopoly is a good thing.

China seeks space cargo launches well below prices NASA pays SpaceX

Re: The metric tonne - 1000kg

The Register's USAifcation means they aren't even using proper Imperial units, but the weird system of short changing the former colonists. As an example; this ---->

First ever 64-bit version of Windows rediscovered … and a C compiler for it too

Re: Occam’s razor

Arm32 also had terrible code size, wasted space on those predication bits. It won in mobile because it was cheap to license.

This was addressed very early on with the Thumb instruction set.

Boss fight cleared: Europe approves Microsoft's Activision takeover

Who expects Microsoft to play fair?

Isn't 40 years of their past conduct, and deliberate violations of other anti-trust agreements, evidence enough for the EU?

EU and Canada on waiting list for Google's AI chatbot Bard

time diff

"For example, we loaded the entire text of The Great Gatsby into Claude-Instant (72K tokens) and modified one line to say Mr Carraway was 'a software engineer that works on machine learning tooling at Anthropic.' When we asked the model to spot what was different, it responded with the correct answer in 22 seconds."

And gnu diff can do it in how many microseconds?

Arm acknowledges side-channel attack but denies Cortex-M is crocked

Those very same holes allow me to run really useful 3rd party code on my old Humax HDR-T2 DVR, so its not all bad.

EU still set to OK Microsoft's Activision slurp, UK disagrees

Re: Could this be?

The CMA is not part of the UK government, Tory or otherwise.

But now you mention it, Microsoft pulling out of the UK could be a massive bonus, saving us from falling down the AI crap hole.

Of course Russia's ex-space boss doubts US set foot on the Moon

There is no NAZI menace for them to defeat now.

China lands mysterious reusable spacecraft after 276-day trek

Re: UK vs Germany

Germany might be happy with Chinese ownership of it technology assets, as it was happy with Russia controlling its energy.

Those of us actually posting from the UK, are glad not to be going down either of those routes.

Misinformation tracker warns 'new generation' of AI-scribed content farms on the rise

El Reg better not. It may now be chock full of annoying usaisms, but at least they are then genuine human generated annoying usaisms.

Buzzfeed, Venturebeat, ZDNet and Cnet have all said AI will be writing some of their content in the future.

And I'm saying I wont be reading any of their content when that happens, if not before.

Top Google boffin Hinton quits, warns of AI danger, partly regrets life's work

Dumber and Dumber

"The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that," he said. "But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that."

AI isn't smart, but given the hysterical overreaction to it by a large chunk of the population, he's probably just realised how dumb people are.

Microsoft probes complaints of Edge leaking URLs to Bing

FTFY

If you're worried about Edge leaking every page you visit to Bing, disabling the functionality by navigating to... not using Edge

Is your AI hallucinating? Might be time to call in the red team

Re: Irony

I, for one, don't expect these "AI"s to have the same rights as humans for a long time ever.

FTFY

Techies all GUI-eyed as Xerox says goodbye to Palo Alto Research Center

Re: Need to cut them slack

Strange then how tiny British Acorn made the best PARC inspired GUI by far, running on very affordable ARM hardware. RISC OS remained streets ahead in usability from the late 80s and through the 90s.

Quantum computing: Hype or reality? OVH says businesses would be better off prepared

Pragmatisim is not...

...jumping on the quantum bullshit waggon along with everyone else.

US Supreme Court snubs that guy who wants AI recognized as patent inventors

So sue

Accepting AI algorithms as inventors would also stop humans from stealing ideas from software and passing them as their own, he said.

If the AI gets upset by meatbags stealing its ideas, surely it can just sue?

Central UK govt awards £12M+ contract to leave Google Workspace for Microsoft 365

Re: Really?

The business case is the millions spent on lobbying by Microsoft.

Google backs Bard to generate ads, which apparently improves creativity

Actually

Google plans to roll out generative AI tools to its advertising platform that will reportedly auto-generate ads from customer's marketing materials and by doing so unlock "a world of creativity," regurgitate the same old shit as in every previous campaign, but without having to pay an advertising agency.

FTFY

ChatGPT creates mostly insecure code, but won't tell you unless you ask

It will produce something that superficially looks like ARM assembler. But in reality is more like asking a small child to speak in a language they have heard, but have no actual knowledge of - some authentic sounds, but mostly gibberish.

Europe wants more cities to use datacenter waste heating. How's that going?

Germany is increasing coal mining output even if they have to bulldoze wind farms to do it.

And they are strip mining lignite; the lowest quality, dirtiest form of coal containing the highest amount of CO2. Yet in Britain we have large reserves of the highest quality lower CO2 anthracite coal, but if anyone suggests we make any use of it, even as coking coal rather than power generation, we are made out to be international pariahs.

Spyware slinger QuaDream’s reported demise may be the canary in the coal mine

Re: More misdirection in El Reg......

Please consider whether this post is created by ChatGTP

I'm pretty sure this isn't Artificial Idiocy, but the genuine article.

Intel axes Blockscale mining ASICs it brought out just in time for crypto winter

Crypto still enjoys its position as the number one preferred payment method for ransomware, extortion, fraud and other electronic crime.

Mars Helicopter completes 50th flight, 45 more than NASA planned

Re: Cool.

Being able to withstand the physical forces of take-off is one thing, operating in the extremes of temperature and the radiation environment on Mars is another.

Red Hat at 30: Biggest Linux company of them all still pushing to become cloud power

No mention of...

...Red Hat foisting the works of Poettering on us?

But you have to blame the other distros for allowing the systemd infection to spread.

Fancy trying the granddaddy of Windows NT for free? Now's your chance

If it is that old and reliable, it started off with a dark theme.

Re: The modern museum

Well it can be done.

Launching soon: ESA's Juice to probe Jupiter's moons for signs of possible life

Re: Closer etc

Please don't let them in, in the first place. We've seen these confusing inverted comparisons in many articles since the scourge of usaification.

San Francisco fog defeats pack of Waymo robo-taxis

On my last full day in California I rushed back down the coast get some pictures of the Golden Gate at sunset, and just as it should have come into view the densest fog I've ever experienced came out of nowhere. You couldn't see the bridge from the top of the viewpoint, hell, you couldn't even see the bridge when driving over the bridge. Of course it was a beautiful clear sunset the next day while on the plane taxiing out of SF.

But still, no excuse for a self driving vehicle.

Tiny Brit tech firms win spots on £1.84B public sector contract. Kidding, it's the usual suspects

They've had to sit it out on the naughty step for this one, but just like the other serial failure merchants, they will be back.

Microsoft deigns to fix five-year-old Defender bug that slowed Firefox

Strange how...

...Microsoft's Defender hobbling a rival to their own Edge browser, wasn't a top priority to fix.

Starlink opens final frontier for radio astronomers

Re: Sorry but no.

Sorry, but GO-LoW and Starlink have little to nothing in common, except maybe that they use large groups of satellites

That is precisely the commonality, i.e. that is now economically feasible to contemplate such massive arrays of satellites, regardless of what orbit they end up in.