* Posts by RM Myers

669 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jul 2012

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FYI: Most AI spending driven by FOMO, not ROI, CEOs tell IBM, LOL

RM Myers
FAIL

Re: 1 in 4

My guess is 1 in 8 were lying, and another 1 in 8 were being lied to by their subordinates. Remember, the primary role of middle management is to keep senior management in the dark about any problems. Nobody wants to be the messenger who gets shot!

Please sir, may we have some Moore? Doesn't look that way

RM Myers
Thumb Up

O(n!)

Excellent! The class was a course on algorithms and data structures, and much of the discussion concerned determining the order of magnitude for various approaches O(1), O(n), O(log(n)) and the drastic affect as the input data size increased. It seemed like a highly theoretical subject at the time, but it helped make me a much more highly paid developer later in my career.

RM Myers
Unhappy

The need for speed

I can remember a Computer Science professor in the mid 1970's telling our class: "it doesn't matter how fast the hardware gets, poorly written software can still bring it to its knees". It was true then, and it is still true.

Sage Copilot grounded briefly to fix AI misbehavior

RM Myers
Coat

...LLMs unpredictably generate bullshit...

Are you implying that politicians are LLMs, or that LLMs are politicians?

What happens when someone subpoenas Cloudflare to unmask a blogger? This...

RM Myers
FAIL

I assume you don't have a law degree. In fact, "shouting fire in a crowded theater" is covered by the first amendment - this is probably the most common misconception held in the U.S. about the first amendment, and has been thoroughly debunked by many lawyers in articles available on the internet. There have also been cases where the courts have shielded identity on free speech grounds, including a well publicized case eight years ago where a college professor lost a new job due to an anonymous post on PubPeer (https://retractionwatch.com/2016/12/07/pubpeer-wins-appeal-court-ruling-unmask-commenters/).

Apple shrugs off BBC complaint with promise to 'further clarify' AI content

RM Myers
FAIL

Is this Apple Intelligence (AI), or should it be renamed

Apple Lack of Intelligence (ALOI)? Enquiring minds, etc.

Shackleton's Endurance sets sail for polar peril in Lego

RM Myers
Thumb Up

Well Crafted

Both the model and the article!

US Treasury Department outs the blast radius of BeyondTrust's key leak

RM Myers
Unhappy

Re: At this point

You could replace the "U. S. government" in your question with just about any government and the answer would still be "none". Hell, you could probably replace it with any organization with computers connected to the internet, and the answer would still be "none".

Technical issue briefly grounds American Airlines flights across US

RM Myers
Coat

Vendor Problem

Could it have been cloud-y weather related?

Apple called on to ditch AI headline summaries after BBC debacle

RM Myers
Coat

Apple Intelligence - the myth continues

Okay, to be fair, you really shouldn't criticize someone for having low intelligence. Doesn't Apple deserve the same consideration?

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory datacenter flooded, offline until 2025

RM Myers
Thumb Up

"No estimate was provided on how much rice might be required."

If El Reg had a "best line of 2024" poll, this would get my vote.

Japan's wooden cube-shaped satellite rockets to space

RM Myers
Pint

What will they think of next

Will someone create a paper aircraft and release it into space? The vultures will be circling waiting for its release.

Man, I miss Lester. So many great articles. Thanks for the memories.

LottieFiles supply chain attack exposes users to malicious crypto wallet drainer

RM Myers
Unhappy

Re: "Please connect your wallet"

Thank you, thank you, thank you! I was starting to believe the commentards had completely lost the talent for victim blaming and shaming. You have renewed my faith.

Having dealt with the super old, I can think of reasons why someone would fall for something so obvious. I'm not just considering the cognitive decline, there is also an innocence that is almost childlike. Also, there are many medications which make people highly subjectable - there is a reason you are told after certain surgical procedures to avoid any financial transactions, and they require you have someone you trust take you home.

Sketchy financials send Supermicro auditors running for the hills

RM Myers
Headmaster

...settling with a corrupt judiciary without admitting guilt.

They settled with the SEC, which is a regulatory body which is not part of the judiciary.

Apple quietly admits 8GB isn't enough in 2024, M4 iMac to ship with 16GB as standard

RM Myers
Coat

64K is enough

64K! This is the very definition of profligation! 1K of ram was more than enough for my first PC (KIM 1). Anything more is just showing off.

41-million-digit prime crunched by datacenter GPUs

RM Myers
Happy

Re: Is this any more useful than "AI", or more amusing cat videos?

I doubt anyone searching for Mersenne primes does it because they think it will be useful. This has more to do with proving you can meet the challenge, and bragging rights. Much pure maths has been created with little to no expectation of usefulness, although a surprising amount has subsequently turned out to have serious importance, once the physicists, cryptologists et.al. got involved.

Missing Thunderbirds footage found in British garden shed

RM Myers
Headmaster

Re: What about the animated?

You never got board of watching them? I wood have like watching them also.

ESA spending €17M on spacecraft just to watch it go up in flames

RM Myers
Coat

They're watching it get pooped out! Definitely more than just scandalous! And I thought the lack of privacy online was bad! On toilet is even worse.

10 nasty software bugs put thousands of fuel storage tanks at risk of cyberattacks

RM Myers
Joke

Re: Tank commander

You do realize that rust is the main problem these storage tanks have. One of the main reason for monitoring the fuel level is to catch leaks caused by rust. I doubt anyone is looking to increase the rust risk.

Cyber crooks shut down UK, US schools, thousands of kids affected

RM Myers
Unhappy

Re: “we cannot have school without these critical systems in place”

Similar experience, although we did miss one day when the morning temperature was -23F/-30C. Mind you, school wasn't cancelled directly due to the cold, but rather because the school buses wouldn't start. I lived in a small town, and many students lived on farms far from the schools.

Google splats device-hijacking exploited-in-the-wild Android kernel bug among others

RM Myers
Unhappy

On a wing and a prayer?

Bring the hammer down on Nvidia, US progressive and antitrust orgs urge the Feds

RM Myers
Mushroom

Re: Zero biiiiiilion dollars!

Maybe zero-infinity dollar market! Oh wait, there be dragons.

AMD stalls Ryzen 9000 launch over poor chip quality

RM Myers
Thumb Up

Re: Didn't anyone tell them?

HAL, is that you?

Life, interrupted: How CrowdStrike's patch failure is messing up the world

RM Myers
Unhappy

Re: What's the bet..

What's the likelihood that Crowdstrike had already started using AI to help with their patch process?

Batten down the hatches, it's time to patch some more MOVEit bugs

RM Myers
Coat

Is the solution as simple as reMOVEit?

Okay, okay, all sufficiently complex applications exposed to the internet have security bugs, security is extremely hard, and perhaps most importantly MOVEit's security vulnerabilities have been found and patched. However, we could have said the same, and many probably did, after the last MOVEit fiasco, and here we are again.

Europe accuses Apple of preventing devs from telling users about world outside

RM Myers
WTF?

"The Register has asked Apple to comment."

Time to place your bets! Which is more likely: AI superintelligence in 3 years which is 10,000 times human intelligence, or Apple responds to El Reg's request for comment. If I read an article saying either one has happened, I will just assume it was written by a hallucinating AI.

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

RM Myers
Mushroom

"...hear the sound those ancient AT MFM drives..."

I can still hear the sound the old IBM Deathstars made in their death throes, even over the sound of my gnashing teeth and screams of anguish.

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever's new startup aims to create 'safe superintelligence'

RM Myers
Unhappy

"...cracked [sic] team of the world's best engineers and researchers..."

Finally, an AI company gives an honest assessment of the type of employees they want. If you are going to be competitive in the world of BS bingo, then cracked it is!

White House report dishes deets on all 11 major government breaches from 2023

RM Myers
WTF?

...the majority (38 percent) were classed as "improper usage...

When did the definition of majority get changed to include percentages less than 50? It may be the most common, but it still seems like less than half the total!

Ends pedantic rant, shakes fist at these youth trashing the English language.

Best Buy and Geek Squad were most impersonated orgs by scammers in 2023

RM Myers
WTF?

Impersonated by scammers?

I'm confused. Based on all the complaints about the Geek Squad on the internet, I assumed they were the scammers. Does this mean we now have scammers posing as scammers, i.e., recursive scamming? The mind boggles!

Man behind deepfake Biden robocall indicted on felony charges, faces $6M fine

RM Myers
Coat

What is the difference here?

Misleading just means it is tending to create a false impression. Outright lies are just flat out not true - no impression needed.

Okay, okay, I'm leaving. No need to shove me out. Jeez, some people can't take a (poor) joke.

Space insurers make record-breaking loss as orbit gets cramped

RM Myers
Coat

Wait, you're not claiming that a company in the "AI" business would actually exaggerate the potential benefits of "AI", are you? I'm shocked, just shocked, that anyone could even imagine such a thing. The marketing mantra in "AI" is widely recognized to be "under promise and over deliver", after all. Shame, shame, a cynic is in our midst.

Solar eclipse darkened skies, dampened internet traffic

RM Myers

I was luckier, there were just a few wispy clouds that didn't block the view. I live just inside the path of totality, so it only lasted about a minute, but it was still very interesting.

How to improve Chinese TV? Better censorship, says top tellie-maker

RM Myers
Unhappy

Man I hate Autocorrect...

Wait until AI completely takes over the phone ecosystem - we'll be begging for old fashion autocorrect lunacy.

Before you go away for Xmas: You've patched that critical Perforce Server hole, right?

RM Myers
Unhappy

Re: Don't know about you...

This is the same issue I have with proofreading my own writings - I see what I meant to write, not what I actually wrote. This problem has gotten better with age, since I'm more likely to forget what I meant to write.

Google sues scammers peddling fake malware-riddled Bard chatbot download

RM Myers
Unhappy

"... threatens to tarnish Google's trusted brand"

Okay, Google must have another brand somewhere that.... Oh never mind. This is, to quote an old idiom, like shooting fish in a barrel. If the Googlers want to pretend that they are trusted by anyone, who am I to question their delusions.

Canada goosed as attackers shutter hospitals and China deepfakes its politicians

RM Myers
Coat

"...trolls have moved into pretty convincing deepfake... "

Am I the only one who finds this use of "pretty" to be pretty annoying, or is this just another example of why someone with a background in math and IT should refrain from critiquing the language skills of professional writers?

NASA just patched Voyager 2's software but spared Voyager 1 the risky rewrite

RM Myers

I have windows 10 running on a computer I built using an ABIT motherboard bought in 2008 for USD $30. With an SSD replacing the hard drive originally used, it is actually more responsive than when I built it. It wasn't my oldest computer running windows 10, but my HP 17" laptop from 2007 died last year (the GPU had an issue caused by HP's crappy cooling system. The CPU is socketed, but the GPU is soldered and needs reballed).

Ex-Fugees star accuses his lawyer of going full robot in corruption trial

RM Myers
Happy

Re: Oh brave new world

Appeals based on ineffective counsel have been around for decades, if not centuries. In the United States, these usually are based on the 6th amendment to the constitution, which gives defendants the right to a fair trial.

iPhone 12 deemed too hot to handle for France's radiation standards

RM Myers
Coat

Re: I need to look at how the test is done

Yes, that does seem rather quick by French bureaucracy standards.

University cuts itself off from internet after mystery security snafu

RM Myers
FAIL

Re: Wrong School!

The nickname given to the University of Michigan sports teams is "Wolverines". "Go Blue" is their typical rally cry for their sports teams (their school colors are maize and blue).

Don't ask me how I know.

Charging your iPhone literally costs Apple millions as Batterygate saga slams shut

RM Myers
Unhappy

Re: Wow, 65 whole Dollars!

I've had 2 class action payments that were less than $1 USD, and 1 class action which gave me a discount off of "full fare" on airline tickets. I never used the later, since you could get tickets cheaper without the discount as long as you didn't wait until the last minute. Almost no one actually used the airline "discounts", but the attorneys pocketed well over $100 million USD

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

RM Myers
Devil

Software locks are the devil's spawn.

Identity thieves can hunt us for 'rest of our lives,' claims suit after university data leak

RM Myers

Re: OK, I'll bite

Mercer filed the breach letter with a number of different states (probably every state that has a legal requirement), since they would have alumni living in every state. Maine nicely posted the information on their website, and since they only require the data breach notice IF there is unencrypted data, the author was able to infer that some data was unencrypted.

Logitech, iFixit to offer parts to stop folks binning their computer mouse

RM Myers
Unhappy

The YouTube Conundrum

When the repair video creator knows what they are talking about, these videos can be a life saver. But how can you tell which creators are experts versus which are just BS'ers.

Perseverance rover shows up Curiosity with discovery of Martian water park

RM Myers

Re: Doctor?

They are a very common thing in academia in the US. I'm on the mailing list for the math department newsletter from the university where I went to graduate school, and they always profile the students getting their Phd's, including their post graduation employment, if known. Post doctoral researcher/fellowship is probably the single most common job description.

Irony alert: Major airport to be interrupted for two hours to replace UPS

RM Myers
Coat

Re: Do they have a "fall back" strategy in place?

They don't have time. This is a crash project.

Ex-CIO must pay £81k over Total Shambles Bank migration

RM Myers
Joke

"The bank ultimately had to bring IBM on board to fix the problems."

This may be the scariest statement I have seen in El Reg. How bad does an implementation have to be if "bringing IBM in to fix the problem" is considered as an improvement?

Automation is great. Until it breaks and nobody gets paid

RM Myers
Unhappy

15 bit computers?

Or maybe it was a signed variable - one bit for the sign and 15 bits for the number? And 1 + 15 = 16 bit computer?

Baidu sues Apple and anyone else in sight over ERNIE chatbot fakes

RM Myers
Coat

"I can't keep all of these straight anymore."

Sounds like you need to ChatGPT who is infringing who.

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