Posts by Ken Hagan

MS Task Manager turns 30: Creator reveals how a 'very Unixy impulse' endured in Windows

Re: 85k

Task Manager today is 5½ MB, so you've exaggerated but the basic point is valid.

Judging the dependencies fairly is harder since you might need only a single function from an enormous DLL.

UK unveils roadmap for replacing animal testing

From the article:

"As well as organ-on-a-chip systems, the strategy also gives 3D bioprinted tissues as an example"

These are definitely living systems. They will be more reproducible than animals and they may even be genetically human. Both of these things make them a better choice than aninal testing, quite apart from the ethics. These options weren't available in the past. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that, as and then they become technologically feasible, we should promote their adoption and make them a legal way to test stuff.

Windows 11 26H1 is coming ... for new processors only

"Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 11 version 26H1 is coming, ..."

Given their naming conventions, isn't this a bit like MS announcing that the world won't end in the next six months?

I suppose it could be worse: "Microsoft today announced that they've stopped work on Windows 11 version 26H1 because they watched the news and just didn't see any point in continuing.".

Europe to decide if 6 GHz is shared between Wi-Fi and cellular networks

Re: as always the consumer comes last

It should, but most homes don't have wired ethernet to every room.

I agree.

Claims about stifling innovation strike me as obvious bollocks. I can make an equally bogus claim about the need for innovative products in the mobile market.

They are different use-cases though. One is mostly used when you are out and about. The other is mostly when you are in a (friendly) fixed location such as home or work or the pub.

I'm under the impression that these bands have very different properties in terms of proportion through air and various wall materials, as well as suffering different degrees of interference from neighbouring frequencies, so there is probably quite a lot of scope for a rational decision process here.

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

Re: About a billion years ago in internet time (call it 1986) ...

So I've googled it and found only examples that are both archaic and poorly attested (at least in English) even back then.

(That said, gruntled meaning happy is, in the 20th century, apparently a back-formation of P. G.Wodehouse. He is unlikely to be the first joker to have had the idea, though.)

Re: About a billion years ago in internet time (call it 1986) ...

But disembark is the opposite of embark, both of which are in common use, and I'd expect disembowel to be the opposite of embowel, which sounds like a perfectly reasonable word to use for the process of putting bowels into someone. (It's not the language's fault that embowel has, historically, never been needed.)

So I'm not convinced by this dis=intensifier theory. Any other examples?

Bank of England says JLR's cyberattack contributed to UK's unexpectedly slower GDP growth

My reading of the comments is that most of us work for enterprises that won't get a government bailout if we get compromised.

There's a strong suggestion that JLR cut the same corners as many others, but are now getting away with it simply because they are big. Perhaps that's fair, since perhaps they were targeted because they were big, but perhaps not. Perhaps some rotten managers are just getting away with it while the actual company is still a bit screwed

And perhaps that's a bad example to be setting the rest of the economy.

(Not my down vote, btw. I expect you are right that hardly anyone is properly prepared.)

Microsoft will force its 'superintelligence' to be a 'humanist' and play nice with people

How is this supposed to work?

We don't really know how LLMs work. (We know exactly what they do. We haven't a clue why that produces such convincing output.) We don't know how people work either and we've never found a (reliable) way to make people act in the best interests of other people. So what chance do we have of making machines act nicely?

And yeah, all that vector to vector stuff is just embarrassing twaddle in the ears of anyone who knows what vector spaces (or even just vectors, tbh) actually are. This is just a guy drunk on Kool Aid deluding themselves into thinking that they actually have an AI that might soon be good enough to be worth worrying about.

Famed software engineer DJB tries Fil-C… and likes what he sees

Re: "C (and C++)"...

It's not hard to get many of the benefits of C++. Basically if you ever find yourself calling malloc() or free(), or using the new or delete operators, stop right there and learn how to do the same thing without them. I've managed to explain that in one sentence. You can review an existing codebase for flaws with four runs of fgrep. You can begin today by shoving your C codebase through a C++ compiler unmodified. (I think it is still true that semantic differences are all detectable by static analysis )

Compared with learning a new language and porting existing code before you see any benefits, this is a very low barrier to entry.

Re: Not quite ...

I'm pretty sure you can get a CS degree in the UK without being aware that there are such things as lexer and parser generators, without actually writing anything in assembly language, and without knowing more than three programming languages. (And no, HTML and CSS do not count as programming languages.)

In fairness, I'm equally sure you could have got a CS degree 50 years ago without any knowledge of GPGPU programming, MMLs, TCP/IP and all that runs atop of it, and GUI frameworks.

UK agri dept spent hundreds of millions upgrading to Windows 10 – just in time for end of support

The articles says "during the current spending review period (2022-23 to 2024-25)" and so it is extremely likely that any replacement hardware bought during this period will be able to run Win11.

If they have, in fact, been installing Win10, that tells me that the obstacle to Win11 adoption is the software that they want to run on those machines.

(Or, as suggested by several people above, the software that they don't want to run on these machines: namely all the crapware that MS are shovelling into Win11 these days.)

Rust haters, unite! Fil-C aims to Make C Great Again

From the sound of things, you'd need "bindings" of some sort of you wanted to mix fil-C with binaries built with raw C. (For example, every GUI framework that I'm familiar with requires such mixing.) This appears to make fil-C unusable for most real-world applications.

Microsoft 365 business customers are running out of places to hide from Copilot

Re: I see the headlines

This is exactly the point. By stuffing AI into every product, the internal accounts can be fiddled to make it look like AI is making money, rather than haemorrhaging billions.

Smile! Uncle Sam wants to scan your face on the way in – and out

Re: "would help prevent terrorism"

They could be a useful diversion from what those Americans are doing?

Actor couldn’t understand why computer didn’t work when the curtain came down

Easy to test. Show the core dump to someone whose mother tongue is not English and ask them what they see.

AI browsers face a security flaw as inevitable as death and taxes

Well, that didn't last long!

I've been avoiding the AI hype recently so I hadn't actually bothered to find out what an "agentic browser" was until I read the Reg article yesterday and today I find out why I must actively avoid ever using one.

Windows 11 tiptoes further into dark mode with new dialogs

Re: Seriously - A Mode That Makes the Colours Dark ?

I think GetSysColor() has been with us since Windows 1.0. (Certainly 3.0, but I confess my own experience doesn't go back before then.) The Venerable Mr Petzold taught us all to use that API and thereby be consistent with all other well-written apps. Had Microsoft's own programmers done so, "dark mode" would be utterly trivial and just another colour scheme, like Hot-Dog.

In a similar vein, we were taught to use GetTextMetrics() and GetDeviceCaps(), which would have meant the several successive clusterfucks around High-DPI support (from XP through to 8.1, I believe, each version changing the rules yet again and breaking existing apps that had followed the previous rules) could have been avoided.

Brit boffins teach fusion plasma some manners with 3D magnetic field

Re: We have to stop using Heat Engines to produce energy

Heat is not the cause of global warming. It is the inability to shed heat (because of changing atmospheric composition) that is the cause. The Sun is responsible for 99.99% of the heat going into the oceans and atmosphere.

Re: Cynicism is easy

Fifty years ago, solar was never going to be cheaper than ... whatever folk were peddling back then. (From memory, in addition to several flavours of nuclear, there was wind, tidal, and even some fancy magneto-hydro dynamic gizmos that were going to replace your steam turbines.)

What changed? Well firstly, the panels became about four times more efficient and secondly someone realised that the manufacturing them could be outsourced to a dictatorship that gave precisely zero fucks about its own environment. Combined, you have modern panels that are about 10 times cheaper than their 1970s counterparts and so it is perhaps not surprising we've had to revise our thinking over the past half-century.

Go back another fifty years and quite a large number of properties weren't wired up to electricity and so their occupants didn't give two shits what was the cheapest generation method.

Re: Cynicism is easy

"There are specific purposes where AI models can be very useful."

Notably, areas where it is fairly straight-forward to verify that an answer is correct but extremely hard to come up with that answer by traditional methods.

Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day

Re: Time for some maths...

We can draw a third conclusion. Senior management at a large bank are proud to make claims that you've managed to demolish using a primary school level of numeracy.

They ought to be thoroughly ashamed of this announcement, but clearly they are too stupid to realise how embarrassing it is.

Windows 11 update knocks out USB mice, keyboards in recovery mode

Re: PS/2 keyboards unaffected..

I take it you are referring to the lag/jitter of the mouse, but I expect that the hard drive is similarly affected and your I/O performance tanks when you wiggle your rodent.

Windows 11 update breaks localhost, prompting mass uninstall workaround

If it was anywhere near 1/3 then it wouldn't even compile, so it would never have made it into production. Nadella is either a dumb shit spouting whatever his contemptuous underlings tell him, or he takes us for dumb shits.

MS marketeers might have claimed that to fob off some dumb journos, but it lacks all credibility as an excuse if you have even passing experience developing software.

Citation needed. MS have had their own source code control product for decades and NT had a nightly build regime from very early on. (NTFS was dog-fooded from its earliest days, so it either worked or the responsible party got bricked.)

It seems very unlikely to me that there are components in Win11 with no source code.

Some like it bot! ChatGPT promises AI-rotica is coming for verified adults

Re: Oh my!

Where's the training dataset coming from?

Mozilla is recruiting beta testers for a free, baked-in Firefox VPN

Re: Plethora

Not to the SS, no. Probably not to the government of the day either. We have to hope that opponents of the OSA are not in a comparable position.

China moves to extend control over tech industry's critical rare earths

"China is believed to have around half of the world's deposits of rare earth minerals"

I think we need to insert "known" in there somewhere. China is about 6% of the world's land surface area. It seems geologically (not to say thermodynamically) unlikely that that past few billion years of plate tectonics and sloshing about in the mantle has had the effect of concentrating rare earths in China.

US PC shipments hit the buffers as Trump’s tariffs take their toll

No need for a rerun. Just allow the winner to be elected but weight their vote in parliament according to their percentage of the turnout. Every actual vote against someone would have an effect, even in a safe seat.

(You'd need electronic vote counting in parliament to add up all the fractions, but only a complete Luddite could possibly oppose that. Most parliaments around the world have such systems already.)

It's trivially easy to poison LLMs into spitting out gibberish, says Anthropic

Re: Retrievability

So they've compressed all the bollocks on the internet to produce a machine that can generate similar bollocks on demand? Hmm. An interesting take on the matter...

Has anyone put serious resources into training an LLM with only input from particular kinds of sources, such as the corpus of a traditional publisher? (The kind that use human editors for quality control.) Does an LLM weaned on scientific papers give accurate (and suitably cited) answers to technical questions?

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

Re: Dusting Off This Repeated Tale

Would have been cheaper and easier, surely, to buy new matching hardware and simply restore from the backup you made after setting it up in the first place.

Windows 11 gets a fresh Start in latest Canary build

Re: "make it work like it did before Windows 11 messed everything up"

Plus a month.

This month's Patch Tuesday will (implicitly) publish a set of vulnerabilities but will include Win10 patches for them. You have to wait for next month if you want a hole that Win10 will never have a fix for.

Hundreds of millions of business PCs are still on Windows 10 as D-Day nears

Re: Meanwhile...

" it's perfectly capable of running on older hardware and that any additional hardware requirements are artificial."

If you pay a lot more, you can have Server 2025 which is the Win11 codebase and supported. It really is just an exercise in gouging the users.

UK Home Office opens wallet for £60M automated number plate project

Re: CS Lewis supplies

I'm not a philosopher, but I fail to see why being one would allow you to spout something that is clearly contradicted by experience, just because you stuck "may" in front of it. I'm happy to advocate for thoughtful reading, but not at the expense of thoughtful writing.

Re: CS Lewis supplies

Dunno what planet he was living on. Clearly missed the first half of the 20th century. The robber barons do sleep, but they have henchmen on shifts 24/7 and no, their greed is never satiated.

China is building a thriving semi industry off US leftovers, export controls be damned

Re: The world's bully speaks up again

"Someone needs to do some sums"

How are "sums" going to tell you whether it's a good idea to hop into bed with a fascist dictatorship?

Yes, I'm aware that many people consider the US to be heading in that direction, but Trump isn't anywhere close to the kind of power wielded by Xi and talk of "no more elections" is just talk at this stage. My guess? In 4 years' time Trump will not be president and the US Constitution will be just fine.

Brits sitting on £1.6B gold mine of Windows 10 junk as support ends

Re: New cottage industry?

"I sell old hard-drives to people who make clocks out of them."

Is that because of the loud ticking noise they make?

Amazon turns James Bond into the Man Without the Golden Gun

Re: It will be kind of hilarious though

"Do you actually know any real MAGA people? Or are you just relying on third hand information?"

I can't speak for the OP but there are quite a few MAGA people in fairly prominent positions in US politics, so I don't think you really need to know them personally to be aware of their views on a wide variety of topics. Following the news is quite sufficient.

No account? No Windows 11, Microsoft says as another loophole snaps shut

Re: "they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens"

You joke, but actually there is no such screen. Once Windows begins its OOBE you either have to step through to the end or use the Big Red Button. There is no "actually I've changed my mind and I'll do this later".

Re: side benefit for microsoft

How does one "call Microsoft support" and what happens if you do? I thought MS discontinued their unpaid support options sometime in the 1990s.

Bezos plan for solar powered datacenters is out of this world… literally

Re: What about the batteries?

Polar orbit. But yeah, it's still a dumb idea.

Re: 10m down?

We know that the temperature in the deep interior is much less than for Earth, from Apollo's seismology. We also know that 10m is so shallow that it has no measurable effect even in Earth's case. So your conjecture about the average of daytime and nighttime temperatures seems pretty reasonable to me.

Re: Latency

Umm, 1700m X 1700m is about 3000000m², is it not?

AI devs close to scraping bottom of data barrel

Re: It had everything we did, that still ain't enough?

What's next? Hmm. Well once you have used up all the training data in the world you have two options:

1, the AI bubble bursts

2, you train on AI-generated data and keep going for another year before model collapse and the the AI bubble bursts

We're getting close. My guess is that the idiots will go for 2 and so it will be 2027 when the bubble bursts. Plan your pension investments accordingly.

Re: The merits of discrimination

Discrimination is still deemed perfectly proper. You just have to be discriminating in your criteria for discrimination. Typically, discrimination to the detriment of a person on grounds that a person cannot change about themselves is now reckoned to be of doubtful morality. Depending on how seriously it affects them, you are expected to show restraint. But intelligent and polite people still manage to differ on these points and have civilised arguments about their reasons.

It's just the loud-mouthed tossers you need to watch out for. But that was ever thus.

Big money is nervous about AI hype, but not ready to call it a bubble

Instead it falls on the holders of the pensions being managed by the idiots.

UK government says digital ID won't be compulsory – honest

Almost certainly, since there is no chance that they will take an existing implementation from one of our European friends and use that as-is (for which, read "tested").

No. This will be a British ID system. (And yes, folks in Northern Ireland will be told it is a British system, too.)

Windows 10 refuses to go gentle into that good night

Re: Why are people sticking to Windows? It's monopoly and lock-in, that's why.

"Everyone scoffs at the plebs using Microsoft Office, but that's literally what's keeping everyone in the Enterprise on it."

I don't believe it. I think it is the central management provided by AD. Linux has perfectly good options for stuff like web, email and Office software. In most cases they are probably more familiar than the MS equivalents because they don't get buggered by "UI experts" every couple of years.

But keeping the entire fleet under consistently enforced policies? Well, yes, you probably can do that on Linux but hardly any of your IT admins will be familiar with the ways and means. AD is what they know.

Re: Win11 will go onto older hardware

"This works for sure, buy not for enterprise that has compliance audits."

...which may go some way to explaining why MS have started to go soft on consumers but are sticking with the rigid approach for businesses. They know that (medium and large) businesses can't use the tricks.