Posts by Raphael

Zombie ‘who owns Unix?’ lawsuit comes alive again

There is going to have to be a SQL to Simon's brilliant BOFH take on it

https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2004/03/09/bofh-protecting-bodily-waste-in-the-public-domain/463754

GitHub cuts short offer to burn repos on CD after mockery ensues

Re: Physical media has benefits.

Sony's announcement also happened the day after they announced that a catalogue of 551 films that had been purchased would no longer be available to the buyers.

https://www.techradar.com/streaming/entertainment/this-should-be-illegal-sony-is-deleting-over-500-movies-that-people-bought-from-their-digital-libraries-just-proving-further-why-4k-blu-rays-popularity-keeps-growing

What “recent developments” the company referred to is anyone’s guess, though it implied that it came about as some sort of public pressure: “We heard you. And we agree,” the X missive began. (“No one fucking asked for this” one commenter retorted).

Many media outlets, including Tom’s Hardware and Destructoid, speculated that GitHub’s offer was actually a jab at Sony for discontinuing optical media for its PlayStation consoles in 2028.

Dominos Pizza UK started it by mocking Sony that they would go digital only on their pizzas.

and various other companies decided to hop onto the bandwagon.

The new database world according to Google: Inexact queries and AI in everything

yes, and in the things I am working on, people may be asking inexact questions, but need the exact answers as the answers may have legal implications. Get it wrong, and our company is the one that gets into trouble.

Which, oddly enough, is why exactly Google is getting in legal trouble for inaccurate AI summaries.

Final step to put new website into production deleted it instead

Many moons ago I was onsite with a client (a NSW council that shall remain nameless) doing a production deploy of a new tool that integrated with their document management system.

It was going well. And although I wasn't allowed to actually touch a keyboard when things were being done on Prod there were no hiccups, each step being documented as we went.....until the end, we were actually finished, when someone else accidentally restored a backup meant for another environment over our work for the morning.

I had to catch a taxi in 45 minutes to get to the airport in time for my flight back to New Zealand, so was thrust into the chair and asked how quickly I could redo all the steps on prod we had painstakingly done in the morning, as it needed to be signed off as complete before I left.

I did it with 15 minutes to spare to run down to the taxi rank (10 minutes run away) and just managed to make my flight home

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

amusing as it is, it's not that different to the people who listen to their GPS telling them to drive into the lake.

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

Re: lawyers and documents

We do public consultation software. One of our clients printed out letters to submitters, so the mayor could physically sign each one. They then scanned the letters (to PDF) and uploaded them back into our system to email to the submitters. They then wondered why the links in the PDFs wouldn't work anymore.

Re: In the raw

My 86-year-old father wrote a portion of his PhD thesis (Agricultural Economics, specifically timber harvesting) in Fortran on punch cards. When he joined us in NZ in the early 2010s we had to convince him that no one had the hardware to even run them anymore.

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

Re: The Tech is impressive?

I keep pointing out that most LLM AI is simply what we used to call an Expert System with a natural language processor

Microsoft apologizes for not explaining cheaper no-AI M365 plans, and all it took was a government lawsuit

I changed it back some time ago. I had to go to the "Cancel My Plan" page before it would offer me the non-CoPilot version.

(and I am now back on the Family Classic Plan)

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

Re: Took your time

I'm pretty sure the late Lester Haines would have had a splendid pint of beer

Microsoft declares bring your Copilot to work day, usurping IT authority

Re: "AI" buttons popping up everywhere!

Atlassian is probably hoping for atleast on person to click on it so they can start billing for it.

They already did that a while ago under a "your subscription cost is increasing" message which was sneakily changing you over to the plan with co-pilot. I had to go to cancel my M365 Family subscription to get the option to stay on the plan without copilot (which was the original pricing as well).

Microsoft continues Control Panel farewell tour

I wouldn't mind.....if I could do the same things in Settings I can do in Control Panel.

Amazon's Ring can now use AI to 'learn the routines of your residence'

Re: AWS Police

In Australia, Victoria cops want to be able to log in to people's home CCTV (currently it would be an opt-in but I can easily see it becoming a requirement)

https://tanea.com.au/en/victoria-pushes-bold-policing-reform-remote-cctv-access-plan-could-save-200m-a-year/

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1007675657862800

AI can spew code, but kids should still suffer like we did, says Raspberry Pi

Why Johnny Can't Code

A Long Long Time Ago, 2006, the ever-brilliant David Brin (one of my favourite authors) wrote an article called "Why Johnny Can't Code"

It seems things are just going to get worse and Johnny will never code.

https://www.salon.com/2006/09/14/basic_2/

For three years -- ever since my son Ben was in fifth grade -- he and I have engaged in a quixotic but determined quest: We've searched for a simple and straightforward way to get the introductory programming language BASIC to run on either my Mac or my PC.

Why on Earth would we want to do that, in an era of glossy animation-rendering engines, game-design ogres and sophisticated avatar worlds? Because if you want to give young students a grounding in how computers actually work, there's still nothing better than a little experience at line-by-line programming.

Only, quietly and without fanfare, or even any comment or notice by software pundits, we have drifted into a situation where almost none of the millions of personal computers in America offers a line-programming language simple enough for kids to pick up fast. Not even the one that was a software lingua franca on nearly all machines, only a decade or so ago. And that is not only a problem for Ben and me; it is a problem for our nation and civilization.

BOFH: The USB stick always comes back – until it doesn't

Re: Even worse ...

ouch. My laptop SSD died a while ago. It was at 4:45pm so I lost a whole day's worth of work, I hate to think how much excrement I would have been in if I lost a whole month.

Developers feared large chaps carrying baseball bats could come to kneecap their ... test account?

There is a case here in NZ where a chap won a case for some very large damages against the local council, and when they refused to pay, he got the court to say he could start selling their assets

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/northern-advocate/news/whangarei-district-council-to-appeal-contractors-61m-high-court-ordered-payout/ZX2SAAYAFRFALEVFR4HRLNXFXE/

Windows 11 24H2 strikes again – Outlook might not start with Google Workspace Sync running

My colleague is on the new Outlook. I am still on the old outlook. And I am still astounded at how much basic functionality is completely missing. It's barely ready for alpha testing, and is not ready for enterprise.

Microsoft confirms there will be no U-turn on Windows 11 hardware requirements

This is lining up to be the Windows Phone 7 debacle all over again.

SpaceX claims another Starship success, but fumbles the catch

Re: Any metallurgists lurking?

They had an older heat shielding than Ship5 had, and also had purposefully compromised some heat shielding spots to see how that performed.

Zen Browser is a no-Google zone that offers tiling nirvana

"a version of Firefox that worked"

Firefox has been the main browser I have used for development work for the last 15 years. It works just fine.

yes I also use Edge (anything Azure related stays in there), Brave, and Opera daily (Chrome I have not had installed on my PC for the last 2 years)

Logitech Zone 305 is light on the ears and wallet, maybe a bit too light on quality?

I find that Plantronics still makes the best headsets. they're just not as easy to get anymore.

(I have on on-ear set for the office, and a Voyager Legend for on the road.)

Re: All I want for Christmas is

there is also the EXPENSIVE set of Sennheisers, wired with no mic option

https://www.sennheiser-hearing.com/en-US/p/sennheiser-he-1/

Re: Logitech & quality??

I've had a different experience.

Due to a wrist injury years ago, I have to use those split ergonomic keyboards and a Logitech trackball.

The Logitech ones last me longer than the MS ones which die in under 2 years.

SpaceX's Falcon anomaly could have serious implications for the space industry

Re: re: The insulation foil does that on every one of their launches I've watched

maybe I am mistaken and it's the toggle between different cameras but the below from previous launches is what I am referring to

https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1795583341363949684/video/1

https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1786156323878682779/video/1

https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1774194152009568366/video/1

The icing is of course not normal.

Re: Falcon vs Shuttle

The Polaris Dawn was meant to be demonstrating that it's something they may be able to do.

The insulation foil does that on every one of their launches I've watched.

BOFH: An 'AI PC' for an Acutely Ignorant user

Re: Virtual coloured penclis?

Plywood and some whiteboard paint will also get you to whatever size you want.

New York Times source code leaks online via 4chan

PS: Subhead was inspired by Lester's burning Burning Man man headline.

I miss Lester Haines.

HP CEO: Printed pages are down 20% since pandemic

My home printers are an Epson EcoTank inkjet and an aging HP colour laser.

The toner for the HP is so prohibitively expensive, I will never buy another again

Samsung takes bite out of Apple over its mega marketing misstep

Apple copied a 2008 LG ad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SblMbEsMq8Q&themeRefresh=1

AWS customer faces staggering charges over S3 bucket misfire

my accidentally naming my AWS bucket the same as you name your AWS bucket shouldn't mean I can do writes to your one.

(it should be going to my bucket alone)

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

I may have told this story before. But many moons ago I was working for a largish international company (offices in NZ, Australia, the UK and Canada). An engineering intern had been allowed near the internet and read about the latest computer virus spreading around the internet.

Armed with this dangerous knowledge the intern decided he needed to warn everyone in the company. Instead of using some of the distribution lists (the memory is lacking as to whether or not he had permissions), he added every single person in the company to the To field.

This made the email about 2MB in size with all names added. Which meant the mail servers got hit with about 2GB of emails. Which they did cope with.....until a number of helpful folk hit Reply All. After which the mail servers expelled excrement and fell over taking most of the network down as they tried to handle the load.

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

I work with State and Local government departments. all of them have COM add-ins that copy emails into their Electronic Document Management systems.

Even basic ones store these as a .msg file.

This could run afoul with a LOT of laws around records management.

AI comes for jobs at studio of American filmmaker Tyler Perry

Re: So what's new?

AI will end up making such homogenous lumps of films that current Hallmark Christmas movies seem like varied well thought out scripts

US cities are going to struggle to green up their act by 2050

Re: Chicago is South of Rome

And NZ's antipode is in Spain.

Apple sets new 16,000-foot iPhone drop test after 737 fuselage fail

We've reached out to see if the iMaker has any closer-to-Earth drop test data but haven't heard back.

The chaps at How Ridiculous did a 1000ft drop of an iPhone11, a Samsung S10 and an old Nokia 3310

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2xGzHjYCcY

Uncle Sam will pay for your big ideas to end AI voice-cloning fraud

I watched a Youtube Law stream a while ago, and the one lawyer does Family Law and was pointing out what a nightmare this is. You can relatively easily use AI to fake up a call from an ex having them say all sorts of nasty things. and you could probably get around any watermarks by using a crappy speaker to play it and then record from there. Now you have to try and prove that your client didn't say what was on the recording.

Superuser mostly helped IT, until a BSOD saw him invent a farcical fix

in South Africa, the 3½-inch floppy was called a stiffy.

Musk floats idea of boat mod for Cybertruck

Clarkson, Hammond and May did cross the Channel in a ute with an outboard attached.

To infinity and ... just over the Atlantic

Re: Launch, yes. Make it to orbit, no.

I miss Lester Haynes.

Re: Worth pausing and remembering ...

Angolan, no. but there was the Zambian one in the 60's

https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/zambian-space-programme

after all rolling prospective "afronauts" down a hill in an old oil drum is the best way to training them

China's SpaceX wannabe recycles a rocket after just 38 days

Re: "I" stuff

not to mention that Cisco had the iPhone years before Apple wanted the name

Ford SYNC 3 infotainment vulnerable to drive-by Wi-Fi hijacking

Re: Dumb cars...

yep, while I like some of the new features, I do miss my old Mini where everything was simple (I even fixed an electrical fault once with a small piece of wire). You just had to remember to have a plastic bag over the distributor cap to make sure no water got in.

Never mind room temperature, LK-99 slammed as 'not a superconductor at all'

Re: Which does raise the question...

the chap who made the video has apparently come forward and said that he faked it all.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/lk-99-video-fraud-taken-down

UK watchdog reopens consultation on Microsoft's bid for Activision Blizzard

Re: They will get it

They would have to try really hard to be worse than Blizzard is right now.

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

Re: QWERTZ/QWERTY.

I use the MS one at home, and the nice Logitech one at work (due to a wrist injury from a fall, and 3 surgeries to try fix it, I get sore if I have to use a flat keyboard)

Producers allegedly sought rights to replicate extras using AI, forever, for just $200

this may be one of the reasons why the US Supreme Court recently ruled against the Andy Warhol estate that Warhol's painting of a photo of Prince was a violation of the Photographer's copyright (as it was used for Financial Gain).

I am sure the copyright cases against OpenAI by Sarah Silverman et al. will be citing this case.

Microsoft, OpenAI sued for $3B after allegedly trampling privacy with ChatGPT

"citing The Register's March 18, 2021 special report on the subject."

Yep, you lads are never going to get replies from the MS PR department