Posts by druck

Microsoft App Center has been down for nearly a day, and no word on when it'll end

Re: "Barely anything works," one response noted.

Umm, welcome to Britain Microsoft.

FTFY

Continuous Integration? Continuous Failure from the house of Bill more like.

Ubuntu 23.04 'Lunar Lobster' beta is here in all its glitchy glory

It demanded at least 18GB...

...and you gave it 19GB? I'm not surprised it locked up after a bit, it does need some additional elbow room for temporary files when installing. Even a significant upgrade will fetch up to a couple of GB of files, and unpack them. Look at a df -h after an upgrade and again once you've done an apt clean.

Euro privacy regulators sniff Italy's ChatGPT ban, consider a pizza the action

Re: Italy, you are badly wrong

I would be pissed if they blocked ChatGPT here too, as it is of a HUGE economic value.

Doing your homework for you, is no value to the rest of the economy.

Defunct comms link connected to nothing at a fire station – for 15 years

Re: Pointless reports

They used to generate various regular reports eg number of people born in a each district by age

Surely all 0?

Azure blunder left Bing results editable, MS 365 accounts potentially exposed

Re: Another day, another MS cockup.

or no t used by the QA Team.

FTFY

Jack Ma is back, and he has some feelpinions to share

Back just in time...

...to see his empire split up and taken away from him by the CCP.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/29/alibaba_splits_into_six_companies/

French parliament says oui to AI surveillance for 2024 Paris Olympics

Re: The Olympics have always been a political joke and a waste of time

And worse the IOC are beholden to Putin, agreeing to let Russians and Belorussians compete as if the war in Ukraine had just disappeared.

Critical infrastructure gear is full of flaws, but hey, at least it's certified

"Most of the software components involved (84 percent) "were written in C++ which is typically more tedious and involved than C or .NET," the researchers explain,"

Really? C++ is far less tedious than C, just using string classes to avoid the pitfalls of character buffers and the standard C library string functions, is worth it alone before even considering the benefits of C++ standard library or Boost.

.NET or rather C#, is even less tedious with its much cleaner syntax and plethora of help classes, but let down by poorer performance, non deterministic memory handling and a massive runtime on Linux.

SpaceX tries to de-orbit Amazon's request for a satellite broadband shortcut

Re: Oooh handbags at dawn...

Joy!

Vessels claiming to be Chinese warships are messing with passenger planes

Most of the time altitude information comes from GPS.

It does not, never has done, and probably never will do. The primary source of altitude information is the far simpler and more reliable pressure altimeter.

Re: Peak China?

The Start Wars trick is still working well today forcing everyone* to use resources investing in Quantum Computing, just in case anyone else gets there first.

* Look to see who isn't actually spunking billions on this fairy story.

Enter Tinker: Asus pulls out RISC-V board it hopes trumps Raspberry PI

This ^^^ x 1e6.

RISC V for the consumer will be no different to ARM or anything else - no more open, no cheaper and no utopia. The firmware will be the same old closed source, dodgy and unmaintained mess, and the manufacturer is going to pocket the couple of cent saving of the ARM licence fee. If anything it will be harder for 3rd parties to create replacement firmware if every vendors RISC V SOC uses a different variant of the instruction set.

Qualcomm tries to kick holes in logic behind €242M fine

Re: "...helping Huawi and ZTE to prosper"

I'm not pointing fingers or anything

Yes, you are.

Techie wiped a server, nobody noticed, so a customer kept paying for six months

That's a bit hasty, the user might have been on holiday for a week, or two, and wouldn't have expected their equipment to be decommissioned that quickly.

GPT-4 to launch this week, Microsoft Germany's CTO lets slip

Re: DuckAss

If they want to use Bing, they have to do what Microsoft says.

Here's how Microsoft hopes to inject ChatGPT into all your apps and bots via Azure

Its hard to tell if that putrid marketing twaddle is the work of a real MS drone or spat out by their own AI nonsense.

Lenovo revs up a rackable Aston Martin … workstation?

Re: Little Confused.

Wouldn't Green and Yellow been more in keeping?

That's Lotus.

Microsoft wants you to build quantum apps in Azure, the cloud that's both up and down

Re: IBM is a quantum monster

Out of the 67 quantum processors existing in 2023 so far, IBM makes 34 of them, so half of all the model types in existence.

None of then work though. Even the journalists are starting to see through the hype now, as it says in the article.

While fault tolerant quantum supercomputers remain a ways off – if they're even possible in the first place

How about concentratring on a different Q

Microsoft Quantum software? Microsoft can't even QA their conventional software.

Once AI can create endless viral videos, good luck switching off social media

Re: Not a new idea (even to Orwell)

I went to the university featuring his shrivelled head.

NASA fixes solar observation spacecraft by turning it off and turning it on again

Only for him to get there and declare "not a bug - wont fix".

South Korea moves to resolve WWII dispute with Japan that troubles tech supply chains

Common foe

It's telling this is happening now when both Japan and Korea are facing an increasingly authoritarian and hostile China.

'Major' news: Microsoft slips Bing chatbot shortcut into Windows 11

Just made for each other

A buggy unreliable operating system and a nonsense spewing AI search bot, couldn't really go together any better.

Microsoft grows automated assault disruption to cover BEC, ransomware campaigns

Re: A nod ?

Why fix the problem at source, when you can sell another product to mitigate some of the deficiencies.

Activist investor tells Airbus to end Atos Evidian talks now

This is all about France trying to avoid the EU state aid rules again, by using their stake in Airbus to get them to bail out another failing French company. It is not an investment which is in Airbus' best interest.

Hong Kong to crypto exchanges: get a securities broker's licence, or go home

Re: Going home imminent

Anti-Money Laundering? There's 90% of crypto transactions gone

Yoiu are a few nines short there.

Norway finds a way to recover crypto North Korea pinched in Axie heist

You obviously missed the fact that only $36m has been recovered and $584mi is still in the hands of the criminals. Its the same as finding a few bundles of notes which have been dropped by the bank robbers on their way out the vault.

Microsoft makes Windows-on-Arm in VMs on Macs official – with Parallels for starters

Re: Apple to support macOS in VM on Windows?

They would lose the opportunity to sell the expensive hardware to run it, so wont.

This app could block text-to-image AI models from ripping off artists

Re: A potential wokable solution?

The solution is the creator of the AI should be legally obliged to have the obtained rights to every image (or textual work or source code) used in their training data. If they can't prove that, an injunction can be sought banning its use, and they face being sued out of existence.

Debian dev to the rescue after proposal to remove Itanium from Linux kernel

Couldn't have got much slower!

Back in the mid 2010s I got bored and compiled a puzzle solving problem I'd written with gcc for the many different tests machines we had in the lab, which were a verity of old Xeon E5v2s, Opteron, Sparc 64X, Power 8 and Itanium 9540 boxes. The Itanium's were the slowest of the lot, only quicker than a few ancient Atom netbooks and and the Raspberry Pi3 I had at home. My desktop machines an i5-760 and i7-4770 beat all of them.

IBM cheapens Oracle by delivering promised power-up for some POWER servers

Rise of the ARM

But Big Blue no longer has the non-x86 market to itself: Arm recently asserted that its chip designs power five percent of the server fleets across AWS, Azure, and Google clouds. While Arm is making inroads at hyperscalers, few suggest it will do likewise in the sort of on-prem roles at which POWER systems excel.

The same few which poured scorn on ARM being used by hyperscalers, no doubt.

Microsoft's AI Bing also factually wrong, fabricated text during launch demo

Re: My take on "AI"

They did over a decade ago, but those troll sites are trying to sue their way back in to the search results https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/23/google_kelkoo_high_court_1bn_lawsuit_order/

Re: My take on "AI"

For example, I once searched for "bayes theorem" and in the first few results was the heading "Buy Bayes theorem now at best price" from some 3rd party shopping comparison site

They dropped (or shoved on to page 1 million) useless shopping comparison sites like foundem and kelkoo years ago, but ended up getting sued and when they lost in the EU recently, I noticed a few people here cheering that on. Yeah great google lost, but do you want that crap appearing as the first ten pages of your search results again?

ChromeOS now runs on top of Linux and, er, Zephyr ...

Who knows? Maybe we'll see a RISC-V-powered Chromebook

Why? It's not going to have anything close to the performance of a cheap x86 based one, no where near as good a battery life as an ARM one, and likely to be more expensive than either, despite saving a couple of cents not having to pay an IP licence.

Crypto mixer Sinbad looks uncannily like a remix of North Korea's notorious Blender

It would become far more difficult for scammers in another country to collect their payout.

No legitimate use

Cryptocurrency blenders – also known as crypto tumblers – are legitimate tools that some use to protect their privacy, but miscreants also use them to launder digital assets they've stolen or ransom payments.

They are not legitimate tools, as operating in that way on any form currency is money laundering.

Zoox blurs line between workers and crash test dummies in robo-taxi trial

Re: This IS open to the general public

Use the send corrections link at the top to report errors, then we don't have to wade through comments relating to mistakes which have been fixed.

Quantum of solace: Rigetti to cut workforce as it faces Nasdaq delisting

Quantum ain't going to work

Expect much more of this.

Classiq to school academia in quantum computing with help from Microsoft

It's harder to tell apart quantum and scams every day

So they are offering training for a software simulation of what they only hope may be possible, when running on a non existent quantum cloud?

You can run Windows 11 on just 200MB of RAM – but should you?

Re: How did we get here?

That would be Kilobytes not Megabytes.

I managed to write a full windowing system, with desktop, file manager, calculator, clock and palette changer in BBC BASIC running in MODE 1 (320x256 4 colours), although it did need a BBC Master with it's extravagant extra 20K of shadow memory for the hi-res screen. That was in the summer of 1987 while I was saving for my Archimedes 310, and once I had grasped that profligate 1MB of RAM it was all down hill all the way as far as memory efficient programming was concerned.

Screenshot

For anyone using RISC OS, it still runs in a graphic task window, and is one of the examples supplied with !GraphTask.

GPT-4 could pop up in Bing, as Google races to build chatbot search products

If the AI was any good...

...all searches in Bing would resulting in it saying:

Would you like me to google that for you?

BT keeps the faith in 'like fury' fiber broadband buildout as revenues dip

Re: " CPI-linked price increases to offset the cost of inflation"

Paying more than contract rates every month will really spite them.

China reportedly producing quantum computers – good luck observing one

Chinese quantum computers are...

...round, hairy and feature quantum endanglement.

DARPA's quantum computing is powered by ... FOMO

Star Wars again

In other words, if it is possible to build a quantum computer capable of breaking through encryption or compromising the United States’ defensces in any capacity, DARPA doesn’t want to be caught playing catch up with rival nations.

It's just like the Star Wars program (Strategic Defence Initiative) all over again, only this time the joke is on us.

Three seconds of audio could end up costing Fox $500,000

Re: Harmony by disharmony

They used to do it every Monday morning up to a couple of years ago, but now they've stopped and instead will send out a tweet - god help if you don't have a twitter account when a crazed axe murder is on the lose.

Global network outage hits Microsoft: Azure, Teams, Outlook all down

Re: fail

The US based staff were probably still in bed.

Intel chairman exits just ahead of next financial report

Re: Karma

While those x86 dinosaurs are fighting it out, everyone else is switching to ARM.

Seattle: Home of grunge, Starbucks… and now, a quantum computer manufacturing plant

Putting the Quantum cart before the Quantum horse

They haven't got a Quantum computer to work in any real sense of the word.

They haven't demonstrated it can perform any useful function better than a convention system.

Yet they are building a factory to make them.

Sysadmin infected bank with 'alien virus' that sucked CPUs dry

Before SETI was RC5

Before SETI there was the RC5 cracking challenge by distributed.net which I had been taking part in for a while, when I decided like Alf, to boost my rankings I'd co-op a dozen of the Pentium 90 and 133 industrial PC systems which were sitting idle at the back of the lab. There was no direct internet access on the network in those days, with a single PC being available for anyone which needed to access the internet to transfer files from, so I knocked up a script to copy results and new block files between the shared machine and the RC5 crackers. It worked so well I forgot all about it and a year later left the company, it wasn't until 6 months after I had gone someone must have noticed them and switched it all off.

Surely you can't be serious: Airbus close to landing fully automated passenger jets

Re: What would Peter Neumann say?

Some of the most thought provoking articles I've ever read on were on RISKS Digest, and should be compulsory reading for anyone working on safety critical systems.