Posts by Georgski

AI running out of juice despite Microsoft's hard squeezing

Re: nobody who knows how it actually works is surprised

> But it does offer a good insight to one possible use case. Flagging useful data hidden in a sea of data.

Categorisation problem. I have heard of a scientist using it like this. They had a standard question like "Does this paper discuss the impact of X on Y" (or whatever).

A machine can run this across thousands of papers and winnow the whole set down to a readable pile. It won't get it perfectly right and you might miss an essential paper, but you'd probably miss it anyway as you have time to read only a fraction of them.

You could see the same in legal discovery.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not an illusion, but it soon might be

Duh

Watching el Reg commenters, and the Reg itself, say things like:

> [Simply] Recruiting people with the most appropriate skills for a role irrespective of race, gender, or background [, you idiots]

Says you've done no reading or study or thought about this issue in any depth. You're not equipped to have a position on this. You just have your default position "well it's common sense innit".

It's a bit like sending a bunch of techbro teens into US Treasury Dept to decide which spending is allowed, they are not equipped to do it, they think they are smart but all they have is vibes.

How the OS/2 flop went on to shape modern software

Re: Even now, Windows 11 won't run on a perfectly serviceable kit.

If we're not restricting to Wintel PCs, I can tell you a 2024 Macbook, or even the 2021 M1 Macbook, is very much better than any 2020 laptop. The hardware is leagues ahead, and they have somehow not thrown away that power on ads and crapware.

It shows the potential is there if MS & OEMs work hard, but it's too hard.

Qualcomm's Windows on Arm push would be great – if only it ran all your software

Re: Intel sponsored article?

Key word being "moved". Apple can move its devs as it makes the hardware too. Devs follow along, or leave the platform entirely.

Microsoft can offer Windows on ARM but can't make anyone care.

That said you would think it could make Microsoft staff (e.g. MS Office developers) care ...

Rust for Linux maintainer steps down in frustration with 'nontechnical nonsense'

Re: Other problems

The talk is about abstractions over the filesystem, those don't sound like "leaf nodes", they will have many other Rusty nodes hanging off them. Are core maintainers going to be OK breaking all those nodes once there are many of them?

I think there is stuff to talk about there and Wedson & team viewed it as very off-topic. It seems like a bad omen for later.

Twitter must pay over half a million to unfairly dismissed Irish exec

G'day, Australia here.

Thanks for your dedication to staffing up our health services :salute:

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

Re: Isn't systemd great?

Might you be thinking of a Hawk drive? those were 5 MB fixed plus 5 MB removable. I thought Phoenixes were a follow-on with slightly more capacity.

David Lovett (Usagi Electric) restores this and other tech from the 50s-80s. Hawks were the main storage for the Centurion minis he loves. I really recommend all his content.

youtube.com/@UsagiElectric

https://github.com/Nakazoto/CenturionComputer/wiki/CDC-Hawk-Drive

Lords of May-hem: Seven signs it is Oracle's year end

Who would voluntarily deal with this company

Is Oracle (all of Oracle) purely a mainframe style business at this point?

ie milking their old customers as hard as they possibly can,

no matter the chilling effect on winning any new ones (word gets around).

Because new customers just aren't a thing they are going for anymore?

Elon and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad legal week

Re: Just how did he become so successful

He can get money (aka, grift)

That's it. But just occasionally the money gets remarkable people doing remarkable things like Falcon 9 rockets.

More often it's a trail of woe and silliness. hey buddy wouldya like some FSD?

FAA gives Boeing 90 days to fix serious safety shortcomings found in report

from your first link

> David Calhoun, CEO of Boeing said in a recent earnings call that Boeing is glad that the FAA paused its [Boeing's] production expansion, which gives the company time to fix things and do right.

So: Even after the short term-ist, stock price driven, engineering has caused terrible results for everyone _even the shareholders_, he still won't take any action to fix it until forced by the FAA.

Great.

Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women

What are they good at?

Our org is not buying any more Dell as, on top of build quality declining, they aren't even getting the selling bit right? Often we have ordered laptops, had long waits, and then the arrived spec is different (eg wrong Windows licence). Sometimes the laptop immediately requires service repair.

Can't think that this cackhanded approach to layoffs is going to turn them around.

Preview edition of Microsoft OS/2 2.0 surfaces on eBay

Re: Nice museum piece

Here's a fun restoration project. Scientists needed recovery of paleontology data from the 70s (8" floppies) ... seemed to work fine. Of course the text was in EBCDIC but then, it was about fossils.

https://youtu.be/5FVwheTVWko

FCC boss says 25Mbps isn't cutting it, Americans deserve 100Mbps now, gigabit later

Re: I'd say more like 50/10 is realistic

I gave you an upvote as I get by on 50/20 as a home coder. We are in an era where D-VCS won, where we have large package caches, and continuous integration so we're not pushing up the stuff we build locally.

But it's entirely unworkable for content creators - and TikTok et al made everyone into content creators.

Microsoft kicks Calibri to the curb for Aptos as default font

> Cleartype, neat software trickery that won't stand up to today's 4K screens

Anyone know why this is so?

I would have thought a super high res screen makes it “unnecessary but harmless”

Fancy trying the granddaddy of Windows NT for free? Now's your chance

Re: Kernel design

This (plus MAX_PATH) is my single greatest issue with Windows and is absolutely baked in to the design. :-(

Azure admins warned to disable shared key access as backdoor attack detailed

Re: "these permissions could be abused" . . .

This is a bit of a nothingburger; if you get the super key then you can use the super key. No exploits were used to obtain the super key.

What they could do however is disable super keys by default. Sounds like they are thinking of doing this someday. IMO they should do it sooner than that.

Chipmakers, you can have these billions – but Uncle Sam wants a cut of your profits

East Germany also tried this pivot

Fascinating stuff.

"How Semiconductors Ruined East Germany" from Asianometry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxrkC-pMH_s

Twitter begs some staff to come back, says they were laid off accidentally

Re: More proof

There's quite a detectable shift in my timeline since it happened - tons of people astroturfing post-truth and pro-Musk memes.

Some of it may be bots; some may be prodigal children who had departed for "Truth Social", "Gab", etc. and are now returning to support the new boss.

Tesla reportedly faces criminal probe into self-driving hype

People who think "Autopilot" means autonomy, need to spend 5 seconds googling that topic.

"Full Self Driving" OTOH ...

How Wi-Fi spy drones snooped on financial firm

Re: I think we're reaching a point...

I'll answer you in a minute, but first: This video is sponsored by NordVPN...

Court voids 34,000 unfair Fuji Xerox contracts

Your comment chimes with my layman's understanding of Australian law too, so I'm interested to hear more about this judgment. Local outlets like itnews .com .au might tell us more.

The "Australian Consumer Law" offers really strong protections, but is only for consumers hence the name.

General Motors charges mandatory $1,500 fee for three years of optional car features

Re: milk the cow

No-one here wanted to see your porn folder thanks

Microsoft extends life of cloud servers from four to six years

Re: Accounting Tricks 101

Confused me too.

If old kit is past its useful life then it should be written off. But the converse does not follow (afaik)

Twitter sues Musk: He can't just 'change his mind, trash the company, walk away'

If they had a reliable "bot test" then they would ban them all, no?

My guess is that 5% is a guess.

M&A law is not new to regretful buyers who found a mistake or exaggeration, and think it could be a handy pretext to pull out of the deal. It is going to be very difficult for Elon to win on that argument.

Side note. The dude actually started out by claiming he could FIX THE BOT PROBLEM! Now saying it has a bot problem so he must withdraw! He is a clown.

Microsoft suspends free trials for Windows 365 after a day due to 'significant demand'

Re: How much?

A bank I worked at wanted it for their summer internship programme. They gain 1000 extra staff (or some huge number) over summer and then lose them when their next year starts at uni.

Tech biz must tell us about more security breaches, says UK.gov as it ponders lowering report thresholds

In general, EU members can set more stringent parameters if they like. For example nearly every other member state had greater restrictions on freedom of movement than the UK did.

@El Reg: if you have any analysis of why the EU regs would have stopped this, I'd love to read it. For obvious reasons UK.gov is not a neutral party on this topic.

Dev creeped out after he fired up Ubuntu VM on Azure, was immediately approached by Canonical sales rep

Re: LinkedIn

Linkedin's ownership doesn't matter for this story.

Salesdroids, recruiterdroids, all kinds of droid find it easy to find anyones LinkedIn profile because they feature real names with real employer names

And so does the Azure profile, obvs.

Visual Studio Code 1.45 released: Binary custom editors and 'unbiased Notebook solution' in the works

VS is slower and slows down more the larger your solution gets. (And what is the point of solutions anyway?)

It's ridiculous how much faster "Find in Files" is.

Lots of things are at least a tiny bit faster - you might only wait a beat in VS, but in VS Code it's done instantly as your fingers go clicky clicky on the keyboard. You feel like a wizard.

I am currently using both VS and VSCode, Code filling the role of Notepad++. (It totally kicks its ass. For starters - No menu-hunting ever!) Yeah Jetbrains IDEs are usually pretty nice, need to get me back a Resharper license.

Let's talk about the RBS IT cock-up

Transcript

I presume El Reg will post a transcript after the chat?

(- Ex RBS staffer, now in a really bad timezone)