Posts by nijam

Dyson moans about state of UK science and tech, forgets to suck up his own mess

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

> Is this a good way forward?

The best.

Autonomy founder Mike Lynch flown to US for HPE fraud trial

Re: "On April 21, the High Court refused Dr Lynch's permission to appeal his extradition"

> Autonomy faked their audit.

No, the audit is carried out by an independent organisation. So it must be the auditors who faked it.

Sonatype axes 14 percent of staff, reminds them not to talk to the press

Re: An Award-Winning Workplace for Innovators

> Looks like someone forgot to update the website

They're just carrying on the lies they told their employees, surely?

Dump these insecure phone adapters because we're not fixing them, says Cisco

Re: Bit hard on the bright young things?

> It breaks only by force.

Or heat. Or grit. Or by putting a stylus on it.

Users complain over UK state-owned bank's services as Atos eyes the exit

Rather scarily, I have to turn off every bit of browser security that I can before I stand a chance of logging in to their site.

China labels USA 'Empire of hacking' based on old Wikileaks dumps

> China's Communist Party often points out that challenging the legitimacy of governments is a big no-no

A bit of an own goal for an organization that owes its very existence to challenging the legitimacy of the preceding Chinese government, surely?

No more feature updates for Windows 10 – current version is final

Re: Linux desktop

> The problem is Linux doesn't work on all computers.

But, seemingly, on more than Windows 11 does.

Re: Err

> I'd hope that an English court and jury would interpret it that way if it came to a breach of contract.

I'd hope they throw it out as meaningless.

Re: improvements?

> Too hard to answer?

Too many to mention, perhaps?

> We all know that Windows 11 is coming with the turn off date for Windows 10.

What's the turnoff date for Windows 11? Windows 12? Better yet, the turn-off date for Windows (any version)?

> I understand that Microsoft don't want to support legacy hardware and software indefinitely, but neither do I want to scrap a perfectly good PC.

The fact that you consider it "perfectly good" implies that it's a long way from being "legacy hardware", of course.

Re: predictable response.....

> If I had a nickel for every time someone...

Another predictable response, then.

I've never used Windows 11. Or 10. Or 7. Or Vista. (Though I had lots of fun watching many people who tried to use them.)

Because it's been the year of Linux for me for the past 20 years.

Microsoft is busy rewriting core Windows code in memory-safe Rust

> Correctness FIRST.

Yes indeed. Or, to quote the great Edgser Dijkstra, "Why are you in such a hurry for your wrong answers anyway?"

Oracle's examplar win over SAP for Birmingham City Council is 3 years late

> It's amazing that local government is able to function at all.

It would be amazing if ...

Support chap put PC into 'drying mode' and users believed it was real

Re: Buying time

> Shutdown is also a command

... i.e. a verb, in both computer jargon and in everyday Engish.

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

Re: Why are we still giving contracts

> We should not be exporting money to EU companies.

That's why they're switching from one American cloud to another (possibly worse) American cloud, obviously.

Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster scuttles into public view

Re: Desktop versus server

> 1. If you don't understand basic Git syntax, what are you doing anywhere near a server?

What? Ubuntu downloads updates from git? Surely not!

Not that I care, I switched to Debian when they were trying to make Ubuntu into a mobile phone OS.

> 2. If you don't have backups of your configs to do a merge later, what are you doing anywhere near a server?

OP clearly had the old configs to hand - presumably via a backup - and was only pointing out that they weren't compatible with the latest software. Which for some reason isn't backward compatible, and certainly doesn't automate the conversion.

Rust Foundation so sorry for scaring the C out of you with trademark crackdown talk

Re: Political?

> ...naive 1st worlders.

No, actually naive 2nd worders (previously called new worders), I think you'll find.

Re: Political?

> The comments from the Rust Foundation all sound like they came from the mouths of politicians. Lost of "sorry, not sorry" comments and "oh, we've been misunderstood" and "it was not our intention to...", blah, blah, blah.

Fungus or corrosion, neither are appealing things to have named it after. Seems the rot has spread to the management as well.

UK government scraps smart motorway plans, cites high costs and low public confidence

Re: The existing ones don't even meet the spec

> ... if we actually taught/encouraged people to use them properly.

So not at all, then.

> ... keep carbon footprint down

Actually, steady speed driving on a motorwary is more economical than stop/start (or slow-down/speed-up) driving that you find on many roads. All other things being equal, of course.

Firmware is on shaky ground – let's see what it's made of

Re: Getting it free? Surely you jest ...

> You mean free (as in obscure and undocumented)

No, I think it was free (as included in the price of the hardware).

Re: Go multiple steps further

> There never was any user-based foundation to keep firmware hidden and proprietary.

I recall reading years ago (and I don't know how well founded the claim was) that some hardware vendors kept firmware secret to conceal the fact that their hardware might have been infringing a competitor's patents. It's certainly not impossible, I suppose.

San Francisco fog defeats pack of Waymo robo-taxis

Re: Each is armed with...

> ...count the amount of car collisions caused by humans and compare it to the amount caused by robot drivers.

Per mile driven, I hope.

Re: AVs should be better in the fog than people driven cars

> ...they have stuff like radar that can see through the fog.

Despite which, they can't.

Smile! UK cops reckon they've ironed out gremlins with real-time facial recog

Re: I would prefer a higher false positive rate

> That way there is a better chance that the police will not trust the output and might verify by other means before doing anything unpleasant.

Wow, it must be wonderful to be so optimistic.

Plagiarism-sniffing Turnitin tries to find AI writing by students – with mixed grades

Re: A rather important question

> ... because for the most parts that's how a human student writes too.

In turn, because that's how they are taught, dare I suggest?

Re: pointless

> Writing school essays is nothing to do with "retaining knowledge".

Too right! As an aside, I maintain that the popularity of "Game Of Thrones" was down to it being very much like actual history [1] [2], but without the pointless drudgery of essays.

[1] Bloodthirsty, backstabbing, etc, etc.

[2] OK, very few history textbooks mention the dragons...

Feds seize $112m in cryptocurrency linked to 'pig-butchering' finance scams

> JZ lost his entire investment

Difficult to sympathize, unfortunately.

Cisco, Huawei, Ericsson on the hook for Philippine telco's $880M overspend

> ...blamed it on bad procurement processes.

The larger the organisation, the worse the procurement process, as a generalisation.

IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

> ISDN was often mocked as standing for...

It still does nothing; innovation subscribers don't need; and many more besides.

Meta chops another 10,000 employees, closes 5,000 vacancies

> ... engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates ...

If they'd actually thought about it, rather just done statistics, they might have wondered if that could be paraphrased as "inexperienced engineers can't achieve much without the help of more experienced colleagues". But then statistics is a mathematical tool for dealing with ignorance, after all.

Microsoft and GM deal means your next car might talk, lie, gaslight and manipulate you

> anything from Microsoft that "Just Worked" tm

Everybody read that as meaning "only just worked" of course.

£2B in UK taxpayer cash later, and still no Emergency Services Network

Re: Purchase

> ... trouble is so many of them only speak Russian...

Except for those that only speak Chinese.

Wannabe space 'superpower' UK tosses £1.6M at eight research projects

> 'superpower'

I think you mean 'superpoor'.

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

I've reached the conclusion that the problem with AI is not the "artificial" part, it's the "intelligent" part. ChatGPT (like others of its ilk) is simply being just as awful as the other "intelligent" entities of this world.

Re: Lies

> So ChatGPT is full of statistics then? :)

Probably.

Microsoft adds features to Windows 11 monthly – managing it is your problem

Re: "Continuous innovation coming to Windows 11 in March"

> ... so MS have just enlarged the attack surface...

And they say there's no such thing as progress!

Re: Yet another reason to never upgrade from win 10.

> we have systems which have evolved over many years and are quite complex.

Ever thought that might be the problem? Or are you too busy coping with the shifting sands of Microsoft's policies, updates, bug fixes, etc.? That's not the real world, it's something quite distinct.

It's official: BlackLotus malware can bypass Secure Boot on Windows machines

Re: Someone explain to a novice

> ...can someone explain to me what the word 'Secure' means in this context?

It means what it always mean when Microsoft say it.

HMD offers Nokia phone with novel concept: Designed to be repaired by its owner

Re: Lasts 3 years

> ...if someone was to empty my bank account and my pension

Maybe that stuff shouldn't be on your phone anyway.

Chinese defence boffins ponder microwaving Starlink satellites to stop surveillance

Re: How many is critical mass

> Complete Hollywood make-believe

My reading of it was that most of the duration of the film was in fact a sort "life flashing before the eyes" dream as the Sandra Bullock character actually died not very far into the film. If so, definitely make-believe, but not quite as bad as the orbital mechanics that the dream itself depicted.

Infosys founder slams working from home, side hustles, as slowing India's growth

> "The future of the country is on your shoulders."

No. "The future of the company is on your shoulders."

'Ethical hacker' among ransomware suspects cuffed by Dutch cops

> ... it's possible that in each case the data was justifiably held.

Possible, but given the world we live in, unlikely. Very.

I can't do that, Dave: AI drowns top sci-fi mag with story submissions

Re: Once again we're feeding the consumersism!

> ... they're spinning stories to ...

... investors, employees, government agencies, voters ...

Re: "...AI could turn writing from a serious craft into a cheap commodity"

> ... always will be a market for publishers that filter out dross ...

Sadly, as has been reported in this very organ, there are "publishers" who effectively filter out quality. Fake academic journals and the like...

Re: Author's guild

> "Am I really that bad?"

To judge from some (not all, of course) books that appear on Amazon's "Daily Deal", they answer is all too frequently "Yes, you are".

UK tax authority nudges net 'influencers': You may owe us for those OnlyFans feet pics

Re: Customer?

> It's a protection racket.

No, actually, it's "demanding money with menaces". Quite a serious crime.

systemd 253: You're looking at the future of enterprise Linux boot processes

Re: so...?

> just don't expect other people's machines to have the key installed out of the box

Well, no machine should have keys installed out of the box, of course. They do, but they shouldn't.

99 year old man says cryptocurrency is for idiots

> Munger once described Bitcoin as "disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization"

That is the first time I've hear a good reason for cryptocurrencies.