Posts by Petalium

Uncle Sam aims to help nuclear energy find its sea legs

It will be wild when the old, worn out ships gets sold to the less reputable shipping companies, you know the ones that run the ship until it sinks.

Airbus keeps an A350 flying for 24 hours

Re: Noise cancelling headphones

Yes, it’s the only thing that makes long flights bearable, unfortunately I have a tendency to forget them on the plane, on my forth set now…

EU waves through open source age-check tool to keep kids safe online

This will only serve to give the winos on the park bench an additional income stream..."Owning" cars and companies and now also age verification.

Atlassian’s new data collection policy protects rich customers while AI eats the rest

Re: We fed the data monster. Its appetite only grew.

Trying to get my wife to not hand out her email, telephone number or Facebook for the slightest free-be has turned out to be a futile exercise.

Visual Studio 18.5 lands with AI debugging at a price, devs still feeling blue

Re: Product quality

When Borland Delphi went to shit, I jumped ship to Visual studio, now that is going to shit I’m happy to be retired and only dabbles with the occasional SQL query when I feel nostalgic. Sweet text editor with the only feature being code highlighting.

UK copper fired after faking keyboard taps using photo frame

Re: Performance measurement

Anything measured by KPI will optimise for the KPI. Used to consult for a large telecom company, the boss suddenly got a KPI on the average hourly cost for consultants, obvious solution was to keep the ones he had, and buy a couple of dozen consultants from Tata to keep the average low. The Tata ones never got any work, but the KPI was hit.

Top cloud providers to outspend Ireland's GDP on AI in 2026

Re: The Wreck of the good ship Cloud

They don't have a plan on how to recover the investments, the plan is to skim some investor money of the top and piss the rest away on hardware that has a lifecycle of a few years ( so banks won't touch it with a barge pole as it can't be used as collateral). An all for some glorified statistics calculator.

Pop music fans literally dying to stream hot new albums – in car crashes, that is

Probably because the adult portion of the population is desperately trying to find the off button on the radio…

Linus Torvalds: Someone ‘more competent who isn't afraid of numbers past the teens’ will take over Linux one day

Re: 19.19

Patrick Stewart reading the star date of the release when checking the version is the only acceptable solution.

Dell wants £10m+ from VMware if Tesco case goes against it

It's funny when the ,"you will own nothing" happens to someone that can actually fight it.

Don't know if anyone here watches "Adam Something" on Youtube but his take on the subscription model as a return to feudalism is interesting

link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqR7z2eHOBE

AI faces closing time at the cash buffet

Re: Pointless

There was a web site that put clothes on women. It was called Boo.com and is the poster child for burning investor money during the Web 1.0 era…

NASA tries Curiosity rover's Mastcam to work out where MAVEN might be

Probably got hit by a Tesla.

Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030

Have them fix the mess that is settings in Windows first….

Hot for its bot, McKinsey may cut thousands of jobs

Re: Plughole Orbits

Where will they find the experts when they don’t bother to train a bunch of newbies by letting them do the grunt work?

New boss took charge of project code and sent two billion unwanted emails

I always assume that emails are not something that requires my prompt response and can wait until Friday afternoon, if you are in a hurry call me it’s faster than texting back and forth.

China's CR450 bullet train clocks 453 km/h in pre-service tests

Trains in Europe don’t need to be faster, they just need to be on time. A nice train journey through Europe with a nice restaurant wagon attached is ideal.

Hyperscalers try to beat the heat with larger racks, more air flow

And here we had the chance to go metric…

AI boffins teach office supplies to predict your next move

It’s getting to the point where every time I hear AI, I reach for my gun.

Also, will the stapler be red?

Only way to move Space Shuttle Discovery is to chop it into pieces, White House told

Soooo, bring back Elons roadster, and then have an astronaut park it at the museum, job done.

EU starting registration of fingerprints and faces for short-stay foreigners

Re: Another brexit benefit

It’s freedom of movement, not freedom from identification…. Same was true travelling to the UK, you had to prove who you were. Travelling within the mainland could be done in complete anonymity if you wanted to.

Microsoft continues Control Panel farewell tour

Re: Fix the regional settings would help

I feel you, I'm trying to get rid of Mandarin on my machine, thank good for google translate.

AI crawlers and fetchers are blowing up websites, with Meta and OpenAI the worst offenders

Re: Anecdotal, but telling

Because they buy the cheapest script kiddies out there, and the managers are all MBA graduates and therefore knows less than nothing about anything.

Talk to the bot: Salesforce AI agents could replace US govt employees

For the usefulness of automated AI systems they might as well replace them with a cassette tape that repeats ”talk to the hand”.

If I call support it’s because I can’t be helped by any other online resource, therefore it is probably not in their AI:s capability to help me and it’s just another way to annoy me.

No more Blocktoberfest? German court throws book at ad blockers

Is it also a copyright violation to cut out the advertisement in a dead wood newspaper?

Uber to roll out thousands of robo-cabs built by China’s Baidu

Re: Is it safe?

No, but since it’s China, no one cares.

China accuses Taiwan of running five feeble APT gangs, with US help

Re: Beijing complains it’s under relentlessly feeble attack?

They have the Communist youth league with 89 million members, used for mass spamming whenever someone writes something negative about PRC. Then you have the 50 cent army (wu mao) with employees, they have become a rather sophisticated outfit and runs pro Chinese propaganda in social media ( They also control payed western actors on, for example YouTube.)

Builder.ai coded itself into a corner – now it's bankrupt

Maybe replacing the C-Suite with AI would yield a better result?

Want Intel in your Surface? That’ll be $400 extra, says Microsoft

Re: Why would anyone want any Microsoft Surface?

My surface 3 still works perfectly after 10 years of daily use. Converted to Linux mint when the nagging about upgrading to win 11 became annoying. Expensive maybe but good value for money a would say.

TSMC pauses production after strong earthquake hits Taiwan

The alarm woke me up, still wondering what I'm supposed to do with a 10 second warning, well at least I get the full experience instead of just sleeping through it.

Brit tech tycoon Mike Lynch cleared of all charges in US Autonomy fraud trial

…But at C-level you don’t have to pay for them

End-to-end encryption may be the bane of cops, but they can't close that Pandora's Box

Considering Reinhard Heydrich was once the head of Interpol, nothing surprises me regarding that organization.

China's mega-telcos are spending billions on AI servers

Yes, what could a communication company in a dictatorship where your social credit score decides your life be using AI for…..

All hail the Xi

'AI divide' across the US leaves economists concerned

How many AI:s do you need to have in a company to keep them fully occupied by only sending pointless messages to each other? If I remember correctly, the number of humans is 200.

China – which surveils everyone everywhere – floats facial recognition rules

Re: "help police crackdown on criminals and improve security"

After, but the relatives gets a 10% discount on the bullet

China succeeds where Elon Musk has failed with first methalox rocket

Size matters

Whip it out boys, XJP, Musky and Zuck in a three way competition!

Astroscale wants to be the world's friendly neighborhood space garbage collector

Obvious solution is to put a small moon/massive asteroid in LEO, this will clear a path through the debris. See Saturn rings for POC….

How to finance such an operation? AI,mumble mumble ,blochain, something something quantum.

BT is ditching workers faster than your internet connection with 55,000 for chop by 2030

À C-level AI would probably be indistinguishable from an 8-ball, or a can of beans. Or maybe an empty can of beans, since the make more noise.

EU passes world's first regulatory framework for cryptocurrency

The money laundering excuse again, the only thing it accomplishes is the to make it harder to move legal money around.

I recently moved 300k euros from an Asian country to a European country, legal , taxed money. One of the banks where I’ve been a customer for 50 years flat out refused to do it, didn’t even wanted to tell me what their requirements to allow is. My other bank required a lot of paperwork including a personal letter from the manager of my Asian bank, with a verified translation and the complete transaction history. I bet if I was a billionaire drug runner it would have been much easier…

Astronomers say they've seen the largest explosion yet – and we just had to talk to them

Re: The future is only Science Fiction

The normal state of the universe is very lonely black holes quietly evaporating away in an ever expanding universe. It just looks a bit busy now because we are witnessing the birth so there is a bit off a mess at the moment.

Florida folks dragged out of bed by false emergency texts

First time I lived through an alert was 3 in the morning: A very loud siren in the apartment followed by a recorded message through a speaker in the apartment. The message was in Chinese, I had no idea there was a speaker inside my home and I don't speak Chinese.... It however became apparent what was happening a few seconds later when the bed started shaking.

Exactly what I should do with a four second warning when I live on the 11th floor remains unclear, wake up and kiss your ass goodbye?

Pentagon advised to get agile if it wants to keep up with evolving threats

I don’t think you want your military to fail fast...

Besides the requirements for military gear tends to be rather well known, based on doctrine. The doctrine might be wrong though, cough “ Jeune École” cough.

Cardboard drones running open source flight software take off in Ukraine and beyond

Flat pack, paper, hmm when will IKEA release their version? Bönk, the anti tank UAV?

If scammers use your AI code to rip off victims, the FTC may want a word

For audio, label it Justin Bieber.....

Just put a mandatory H on the forehead of all generated characters

DigitalOcean waves goodbye to 11 percent of staff

Managed services, always a race to the bottom. There are always someone who is prepared to do it cheaper

Musk says he ain't going anywhere as Twitter CEO until at least late 2023

Re: He sure does talk some tripe

New superconductor company in 3,2,1....

Chinese surveillance balloon over US causes fearful gasbagging

Re: Why not shoot it down ?

Not only the ballon, the bullets used can cause some damage when they reach the ground, (and they can travel quite far)

China unveils massive blockchain cluster running homebrew tech

Re: Small question...

Blockchain is the new monorail!

Meta axes two Danish datacenters amid shift to AI infrastructure

Just shut down all FB bit barns, euro energy crisis solved!

NASA's Orion Moon capsule to splash down this Sunday

Is the Reg making a subtle joke with the unit conversions ? Or have they hired a liberal arts student to write this?

I especially like the “ Slowing down from km/s to m/s” forcing me to some math in my head to get the scale right.

I’m on vacation damn it, yes that’s my brain floating in the gin and tonic, please don’t take it away my dear waiter.