Posts by Jonathon Green

Angry devs vow to flee GitHub Copilot as metered billing takes hold

Re: Very little sympathy, I am afraid

So The Song Remains the Same… :-)

Re: Who could have predicted this would be a bait and switch?

“ If you must do it get an AMD Strix an Nvidia DGX Spark (or spend a ludicrous amount on a server) and host it locally. If the local models can't do what you want, well, all these cloud services can just keep raising the price until the pips squeak, can't they?‘

Hands up anyone who thinks that licensing for on-prem AI won’t (one way or another) go to a usage based model, like other on-prem services have…?

Yeah. Thought so… :-)

Amazon rewards loyal Kindle devotees by closing the book on old e-readers

“Tonight there’s gonna be a jailbreak, somewhere in this town…”

That and Calibre will solve this problem - not much to lose from fiddling with the firmware on something which is about to become useless anyway…

Starmer's digital ID reboot raises same old questions as its Blair-era ancestor

Re: "if any other party gets into power."

“A big boy did it and then ran away…”

The world is one bad decision away from a silicon ice age

Re: I thought that…

What they *haven’t* got is ASML, and, unless something’s changed since I last took an interest in this stuff they’re still very much The Only Game In Town for EUV lithography, and without that nobody’s making anything very exciting. Certainly not modern CPUs and GPUs…

UK plans right for flat owners to demand gigabit broadband

If in doubt it’s always about the money…

…I’ll take a wild guess that in the majority of cases where an owner, or manager objects to broadband installation it’s because they’re hoping to find a way they can take a cut of both the installation and service costs for themselves by acting as an intermediary.

Amazon complains that Perplexity's agentic shopping bot is a terrible customer

Oh look!

It’s another one of those fights I can cheer on from the sidelines as the protagonists gouge each others eyes out and I don’t have to feel bad about whoever loses!

OpenAI's ChatGPT is so popular that almost no one will pay for it

Anybody want to buy…

…some tulips?

Researchers intercept unencrypted satellite traffic from space blabbermouths

Reg readers will no doubt find this kind of negligence staggering…

…but unsurprising.

Ofcom refuses to bite over Openreach's fiber freebies

Re: Discounted for first 2 years

As long as you’ve had the foresight not to make heavy use of an email address associated with your broadband supplier you absolutely can say “no thanks” and migrate elsewhere (and I know a number of people who’ve successfully done so without significant interruption). The worst thing that can happen is that you end up with multiple grey boxes tacked to the outside of your house….

Managers are throwing entry-level workers under the bus in race to adopt AI

Yeah, but when managers don’t see values in that kind of skillset because it’s “legacy” you can see why the youngsters have followed the money (and/or the requirements in the job descriptions).

While I fully (and sometimes vociferously) agree that those skills are still relevant and necessary if the managers who set the recruitment targets and create the roles don’t see it that way you can’t exactly blame the kids for following that lead…

Bizarrely aformer employer has recently been bought out and the resultant (and inevitable) headcount cull has fallen disproportionately on more experienced people with exactly that sort of skillset (and corresponding experience). Possibly because they’re more expensive, possibly because of the unfashionable “legacy skills” tag, but either way I don’t see it ending well, because even if there were any evidence that the AI enabled development model they appear to betting heavily on worked they’ve also got rid of most of the workforce who actually understood their flagship product, including the former Chief Architect…

Space Shuttle war of words takes off as senator blasts 'woke Smithsonian'

Re: Attack on Smithsonian confirmed.

Well, not yet, but now that the trigger words are being used it’s surely only a matter of time before a bunch of the usual suspects go full January Sixth on one or more Smithsonian sites, hurting somebody and/or doing serious damage to something important and irreplaceable…

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

Re: silly question time

Something to do with penis size I believe…

Re: Cheaper to leave it where it is ???

Indeed. I’ve been to Crete, it was very nice and I never had any problems with the inhabitants….

Hundreds of orgs urge Microsoft: don’t kill off free Windows 10 updates

Re: yes, but…

Yeah. I think it was updates associated with major feature releases which brought things to a grinding halt, and either fortunately or unfortunately (I’m still not really sure which) my experiments took place at a point in the release cycle where I very quick got caught out by one of those. At the time the only way past the bottleneck was a re-installation (and consequently reinstalling all the apps in use).and I wasn’t sufficiently sold on the experience to go down that road.

yes, but…

I’ve done this, and as you say, with the help of tools like Rufus it’s not *too* hard to do and works fine. The trouble is (that in my case at least) you end up with a fully functioning Windows 11 installation which refuses to accept updates, which kind of defeats the point of the exercise.

If the state of the art for this stuff has moved on from there then that’s great, and I’d be keen to give it another shot, but otherwise it doesn’t really help.

I can’t help thinking…

…that if that was going to happen it already would have done.

We know Win11 can runs perfectly well on machines without a TPM, if you jump through a few pretty easy humps you can do it right now. It’s just that MS have made the *choice* to cut installations like that off from updates and if they haven’t backed down in the face of the loud, relentless complaining we’ve seen so far it seems unlikely they ever will.

I do not condone software piracy…

…or the use and distribution of tools which could be used to facilitate it, and so I definitely haven’t enrolled my Windows 10 PC on the ESU channel through “unofficial” channels, you shouldn’t either, and I’m sure El Reg definitely wouldn’t have published an article telling you everything you need to know in order to do that a little while back.

Workers: Yes, RTO makes sense. No, we’re not going to do it

TLDR

'We know what you're selling, and we're not buying it..."

And the unbossing thing is not a a new concept. My former employer (I'm retired now) to their great credit created a new job title, a new role, a new space in the org chart, and facilitated a corresponding salary bump in order to recognise my contribution (and level of seniority) after I repeatedly declined management track promotions. Management is a discrete specialism requiring its own specific set of abilities and talents which I acutely aware of not possessing...

NASA won't name the Shuttle picked to move to Texas

Re: Its a museum piece but as engineering its best forgotten

The issues with Shuttle were, as I understand it were pretty much baked in by (military) requirements for a specific payload shape, size, and weight (hence the size of the vehicle) and (military) requirements for sufficient cross-range capability to support “pop-up” (single orbit) missions (which is why it got wings).

Relaxing either of those constraints even a little could have resulted in a significantly simpler, cheaper, more reliable, less maintenance intensive, and safer design. As it was engineers did their best to address those requirements (which had become obsolete before the first test articles rolled out), but, well, if you ask a stupid question you’re going to get a stupid answer…

I wonder…

…how long you could spin out the process of planning and preparation for a move like this?

Maybe long enough to see off the current administration…?

The real reason why Trump is killing the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawai'i

Re: More CO2 is good

Plants quite like water too.

Should those people in Texas who lost homes, livelihoods, and sometimes loved ones to flooding recently just suck it up and take one for the team?

ASML shares tumble as US tariff turmoil rattles investors

I wonder what would happen if…

…the EU and/or Netherlands simply embargoed sales of ASML kit, consumables, and services to the USA and US controlled entities as a response to the tariff nonsense?

Kind of a nuclear option (“Nice semiconductor manufacturing program you used to have there, shame it’s just a bunch of buildings containing big lumps of expensive machinery you can’t use now…”) but…

Apollo-Soyuz at 50: The Cold War space hug that nearly ended in gasping horror

While we’re talking about Alexei Leonov…

…it’s worth noting that as well as his space going exploits he was a Pretty Damned Good artist, producing some fantastic paintings and drawings inspired by (and often depicting) his experiences in space.

Meta sues 'nudify' app-maker that it claims ran 87k+ Facebook, Instagram ads

Huh?

I’m trying to get my head around the fact that Meta are sueing their customers because their own content moderation mechanisms don’t work.

Truly these are strange times…

Meta calls €200M EU fine over pay-or-consent ad model 'unlawful'

Re: Meta deserves fair compensation for the valuable and innovative services

I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. Although what I think meta the Zuckburghers deserve, and would constitute fair compensation may differ from what they think they deserve.

They probably had fewer face eating leopards in mind for a start…

'Elevated' moisture reading ignored before Heathrow-closing conflagration, says NESO

Re: Heathrow not blameless

“ I'd put money on it that the CEO - had he been awake - wouldn't have decided to close the entire airport for 20 hours when the fire had only been burning for an hour or so.”

You may well be right, but I’d also put money on it that had a decision not to shut down went horribly wrong resulting in wholesale death and/or injury said CEO wouldn’t be in a hurry to step forward and accept responsibility for it. Well, maybe in a mealy mouthed, platitudinous, statement to the press kind of way, but not in an actual personally accepting consequences way…

Cloud lobby warns EU: Clamp down on water rules and we'll evaporate

…but on the other hand it’s a relatively new industry building it’s infrastructure from scratch, and as such requiring it to design in efficient water use now rather than trying to bolt it on later (as is the case for the “legacy” industry sectors) seems entirely sensible.

Elon Musk pukes over pork-filled budget bill with Tesla subsidies on the line

Yes.

BT won't budge over pay hike for manager grade employees

Re: Management is not a specialist skill.

Management absolutely is a specialist skill.

It’s just that (in technical fields at least) it’s orthogonal to the skills of those managed and not neccesarily (or in the tech field often) more valuable or harder to come by, making it doubly stupid and frustrating that management is depressingly often the only career path available to senior technical staff.

The result of this is a middle management class packed with people who (again depressingly often) hate their jobs, aren’t terribly good at them, and get far too involved and “hands on” in the work they’re supposed to be facilitating. I consider myself extremely lucky to have ended my career working for a company who (while not neccesarily perfect in every regard) were prepared to be creative with roles, job titles, and pay scales because I am in no doubt that I would have ended up amongst that number…

Anthropic CEO frets about 20% unemployment from AI, but economists are doubtful

I Can’t quite make my mind up…

…whether this is a warning or a marketing pitch.

Some English hospitals doubt Palantir's utility: We'd 'lose functionality rather than gain it'

Re: No!

My wife and I travelled from Peschira del Garda to Venice and back using Trenitalia’s Frecciarossa service. It both departed and arrived on time in both directions. No little old ladies appeared to be harmed or inconvenienced at any point…

Sci-fi author Neal Stephenson wants AIs fighting AIs so those most fit to live with us survive

Re: Robot Wars

I have a vague recollection of a game/challenge involving two (or more) chunks of code executing concurrently within the shared memory space of a simple virtual machine with the objective being for (human) participants to produce a piece of code which could locate and then disrupt, corrupt, or otherwise disable its “competitors”.

Anyone else remember that, or did I just imagine it or come across it in a work of fiction….?

Hacking US crosswalks to talk like Zuck is as easy as 1234

Re: After the laughing...

Surely you just have to turn it into some sort of underground viral social media thing and thousands of obliging pre-teens will go out and do the (in this case literal) legwork for you…

Trump kills clearances for infosec's SentinelOne, ex-CISA boss Chris Krebs

I like Americans…

…they’re funny!

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

Vance is indeed both smarter and crazier.

A more constructive and realistic hope would be for mid term elections to deliver a Congress (both houses) able and willing to haul on the constitutional choke chains…

Re: Please explain

…and to take a further example I own four USA built guitars and a USA built amplifier.

Re: Please explain

Have you tried making things people want to buy at a price they’re willing to pay?

That may sound trite and obvious, but, taking the specific case of automobiles, when Ford started offering the Gen 5 (2005) and later Mustang through regular dealerships, with proper factory warranties (and in the case of the UK from 2015 on with the steering wheel in the right place) it actually did rather well…

Re: From the "fact sheet", singling out Blighty

“ After a while we were offered the PT Cruiser, so ugly it rivalled the Edsel.‘

To be fair if you bought a PT Cruiser[1] in Europe it was almost certainly built in Austria, and if you bought it in the USA it would have been built in Mexico…

2 in 5 techies quit over inflexible workplace policies

That’s actually not a bad use of a nominally “in office” day, especially if the management justification for a mandatory “in” day is to build relationships and networks.

Years back I did a few years contract work for a company based in Sweden, I used to fly over to Stockholm regularly to spend some time in the office and the first time I went in I was absolutely gob-smacked to find that every week there was a day when the whole (small, maybe a dozen people) would get together to prepare and cook an actual meal from scratch in the kitchen area, set a table, sit down to eat together like family, and then clear away and wash up together, any management team members present would join in alongside. That could easily take up three hours in total but it was the best, most effective way of getting a team to communicate and build relationships I’ve ever seen…

23andMe's genes not strong enough to avoid Chapter 11

Re: The court will now oversee the sale of 23andMe's assets

“ Having a single person's DNA sequence tells you nothing about your family members if you do not have the said family members DNA to compare it with.”

I suspect that comparison would quite often result in some awkward conversations… :-)

Feds charge three over Molotov attacks on Tesla sites in multiple states

Re: All Dictators die ... eventually ... thank god !!!

“ am astounded by the 'Tribal' bickering by the USA contingent on el Reg !!!”

I’m not. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I like Americans, they’re funny!

France offers US scientists a safe haven from Trump's war on woke

I like Americans…

…they’re funny!

$16B health dept managed finances with single Excel spreadsheet. It hasn’t gone well

I can see why an `excel spreadsheet is a bad idea for this kind of thing…

…it’s just that on the basis of every recent attempt at implementing ERP for large public bodies I’ve seen lately that doesn’t look like a better one.

HPE revenue outlook feels the thump of Trump tariffs

Re: Trump could learn a thing or two from Brexit

People keep saying there was no upside to Brexit (and on the whole I completely agree with that judgement) but it did buy my youngest son (who’d just started a job as a customs clearance agent with FedEx at Stansted Airport) a BMW M3, a wedding, and a nice starter flat on overtime/shift payments… :-)

And let’s not forget…

…that their customers will have less money and face similar uncertainty for exactly the same reasons, and hence will perhaps not be looking to update kit and/or will be looking to cut their maintenance costs.

'Cybertruck ownership comes with ... interesting fan mail'

I remember the cave rescue thing.It seemed strangely ironic that the man who was advocating a 10 foot phallus as the solution was calling somebody else a paedophile…

Trump says US should kill CHIPS Act, use the cash to cut debt

I like Americans…

…they’re funny!

TSMC promises $100B US expansion that Trump hails without clarifying chip tariff threat

So, who’s supplying the hardware for this…

…because those ASML EUV litho machines (and the associated support) weren’t cheap to start with, and they just got 25% more expensive.

US stocks slip as Trump pulls trigger on Canada, Mexico, China tariffs

There’s a reason why so much manufacturing was offshored…

Do the Oligarchy reckon that they can drive down wages and enshittify employment conditions sufficiently to sell domestically produced goods at prices which can undercut current producers even with the advantage of tariffs or is the USAnian consumer just going to have to get used to everything being at least 25% more expensive for the foreseeable future?

I can’t help thinking that’s ultimately going to be tough sell once the reality sets in…