Posts by joeldillon

US Marines' latest anti-drone toy is an AI turret that uses regular machine guns

'the fully autonomous targeting and killing of humans with complete autonomy.' is, err, just a tad tautologous I think...

This is your BIOS speaking. Please fix me. Your PC is broken

Modern desktops dont even come with the speaker. Fortunately they still have the header and the piezos are cheap.

If you don't fall for these extortionists' calls, they'll show up with USB sticks

Re: ... always accompanied by a corporate, in-office supervisor

PS/2 keyboards still exist...

Agentic AI arrives for Delphi and C++ Builder

Caps?

Object Pascal surely? The latter at the very least is a proper name.

Plex appeal fades as Lifetime Pass jumps to $750

Not necessarily. Just because it's open source doesn't mean lots of people are going to go to the effort of writing full-functioned Android apps for it for example, there aren't an infinity of open source developers.

US Army goes green-ish, wants soldiers munching on plant proteins

Re: IMP yummy

I had to look that one up, but err, the I is Individual. Not sure if a joke, here, but the British Empire hasn't been around for a while now ;p

Gtk2-NG, next generation of Gtk 2, comes back to life

Re: CTK for GTK3 fork

How on earth is Wayland more 'monolithic' than X11?

Locked, stocked, and losing budget: AI vendor lock-in bites back

Marx wasn't in a position to machine-gun people, though (well except on a personal basis), he wasn't running a state.

More ancient Linux device support faces the chop

Re: Nvidia 470

Firstly, I would hazard that quite a lot of Linux developers are actually using laptops with Intel graphics. Secondly, you don't need the proprietary Nvidia driver, so anyone who cares and is, well, developing instead of trying to run games on Linux can probably quite happily use Nouveau.

The wild world of non-C operating systems

Re: What about Assembly Language?

Technically, the first C compiler could have been written in C running in an interpreter.

As for assembler - it's also pretty handy to know if a) you write a compiler as your fun hobby side project and b) your day job is embedded programming. You may not be writing in it (directly, most of the time anyway) for the latter but it's very handy to be able to read it when things go pear shaped.

Nobody knows how many CVEs Anthropic's Project Glasswing has actually found

Re: "every major operating system and every major web browser"

Well if you're counting Safari you're also surely counting MacOS unless you have a habit of running it on your Windows machine.

Decades-old Linux UI bug fixed by dev younger than the window manager

Re: Bewilderment

While you're not wrong, that's about EFL (the custom UI toolkit Enlightenment is written on - think gtk or Qt) - and is specifically in the context of Tizen, which is written on top of it but to the best of my knowledge doesn't use Enlightenment-the-window-manager itself.

Microsoft raises UK Surface prices as RAM crisis reaches the checkout

Re: Bring back efficient programming

We were bitching about bloatware then too. This is eternal, programmers will expand (both personally and in their software) to fill all available space. Remember Emacs, Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping?

Tech support chap's boss got him out of jail so he could finish a job

It absolutely could be the one in Ontario, tbf.

Anthropic: All your zero-days are belong to Mythos

Re: One of the exploits leaked

I think they're joking.

Yes, if you choose to set a file's permissions to 'anyone can execute this' then anyone can execute it, that's sort of how file permissions work :)

Leaked memo suggests Red Hat's chugging the AI Kool-Aid

Re: Debian expert here

Red Hat employ a bunch of Linux kernel developers. You'd actually need FreeBSD or something.

Staff too scared of the AI axe to pick it up, Forrester finds

'It claims that, among decision-makers, 81 percent say AI copilots are important for assisting employees. Workers must therefore adapt, it declares. This isn't happening'

Turns out that workers are also 'decision makers' not, y'know, mindless robots, and are making decisions themselves?

YouTuber lands on Moon using a ZX Spectrum. Conditions apply

While it's a cool project, it doesn't exactly tell us much given it's written in BASIC. Not like they'd have been running that on the real thing!

Competition watchdog cracks knuckles, probes legality of Adobe cancellation fee

Re: Seems like

'Thankfully I'm not a customer of the vulture co' - err you are posting on here and I'm pretty sure this is run by a commercial entity...

(Relatedly, how has it taken me 15 YEARS to realise 'the register' is a pun)

Systemd 260 kills SysV, tells AI not to misbehave

Re: Does This Claude Feature Mean...

One word: Android.

Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting

Re: get carded buying beer.

You have a particularly strict ASDA. I'm in my 40s and that doesn't happen to me.

Or perhaps ASDA has Views on the morality of the purchase of root vegetables? :)

DR-DOS rises again – rebuilt from scratch, not open source

I don't know about 'hard requirement' given that people (virus writers, and people analysing those viruses) disassemble stuff all the time. But it's not like getting actual source code, agreed.

Execs love AI, just not enough to pay for user training

Re: Nobody wants to train anymore

A tzompantli actually as any fule no ;p

AWS would rather blame its own engineers than its AI

Re: Strive to be the Earth's Best Employer?

General aggro, legal action (if an employee thinks they have been illegally targetted, the role isn't really eliminated etc - not everywhere is America, you know), union action (ditto), or in extreme cases the aggrieved employee coming in with a fire axe.

Re: Strive to be the Earth's Best Employer?

Similarly, it's not unusual for redundancies to be announced on a Friday, giving employees the weekend to cool off.

Congress throws NASA a lifeline, leaves Mars sample mission to die in the dust

'Should the President sign it off' isn't that a veto proof majority?

What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

Calling out the transition to glibc seems a bit much, given that the Windows world was transitioning from Win16 to Win32 not long before; a rather more drastic change!

(And the later (at consumer level at least) transition from Win95-derived OSes to Windows NT, for that matter, had its own pain points)

UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered: First ever version of UNIX written in C is running again

Define 'direct descendant'. Linux was written from scratch (despite what SCO were trying to say back in the day), it has no UNIX code in it. The BSDs originally did, albeit at long remove from this code, though removing anything AT&T copyrighted was part of the process of creating the ancestor to FreeBSD etc (despite what AT&T were trying to say back in the day).

Whatever legitimate places AI has, inside an OS ain't one

A fairly large chunk of the low-level Windows desktop environment is in the OS (by which I mean the kernel), architecturally, and has been since NT4. Not that kernel and OS are synonymous; glibc on Linux is userspace but you'd probably still call it part of the OS.

Cheaper 1 GB Raspberry Pi 5 lands as memory costs go through the roof

Re: AI is now top of my list...

Hmm well I do assembly language programming on a hobby basis because my hobby is my own compiler (well it actually generates straight machine code, to be fair). Writing assembly is a fairly niche thing even with small microcontrollers these days given you can program a Cortex-M purely in C.

YouTube's AI moderator pulls Windows 11 workaround videos, calls them dangerous

Re: I only use Windows for work

The point is, quite obviously, that if you're running Linux you won't need the video in the first place because it's a non-issue.

Amazon axes 14,000 desk jobs in AI-powered slimming plan

Re: no shit sherlock

What do the Australian Labor Party have to do with anything?

(It's LaboUr over here)

Shield AI shows off not-at-all-terrifying autonomous VTOL combat drone

Re: Vulcan

Would they have the range for #2? I guess if it is a one way flight maybe....

(But think of the absolutely bonkers fueling situation for Black Buck in the Falklands war, they needed to top up like 5 times in flight I think)

Windows 11 gets a fresh Start in latest Canary build

'Now, if only a retro version of the Start menu were also available. PROGMAN.EXE anyone?' - OpenShell still works for me. :)

AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'

Re: How refreshing

You realise this is originally a British website, right? We can talk about maths here without scare quotes rather than "math".

Everything is 'different on Windows': Zed port delays highlight dev friction

Re: It is part of the Microsoft business plan

I don't think this sort of thing is intentional so much as that Windows is the last mainstream non-Unix OS remaining. And why should it be required to be a Unix?

Politically hot parts of US Constitution briefly deleted thanks to 'coding error'

You're complaining about a document being misrepresented and you have 'tharter' in there? ;p

You DO see Windows 11 as an AI PC opportunity, say Dell and Intel

'We're seeing strong recognition of this shift among your fellow UK IT decision makers (ITDMs)'

So well a) that's a lie, isn't it, but b) who on God's green has ever talked about 'ITDMs'? Making up acronyms is not going to make you sound more convincing.

Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

Re: You missed the point

Canonical tried to do more or less this, it was called Ubuntu Touch and noone wanted it.

QNX 8 goes freeware – for non-commercial use

Re: Registration required

As an employee, I don't want my boss asking me why he's getting a call from you.

Microsoft developer ported vector database coded in SAP’s ABAP to the ZX Spectrum

While this is awesome, I'm not sure a 7 year gap is 'near contemporary' by the standards of the time. There's only 5 years between the Speccy and the Acorn Archimedes!

Ousted US copyright chief argues Trump did not have power to remove her

So was Hitler.

Fedora 43 won't drop 32-bit app support – or adopt Xlibre

Re: 2038

time_t has been 64 bits on 32 bit Linux for many years now.

Workday promises to grow workforce slowly and differently after shedding 1,750 jobs

I wonder what 'in different geographies' means here.

Are you a big AI business vendor making terrible AI business decisions? We can help

I would be um somewhat surprised if Windows 3.1 let alone 95 was 'largely' assembler. DOS, maybe.

Three ways to run Windows apps on a Linux box

Not that it would actually do any harm, but I'm not sure what you'd get from rebooting after installing WINE. I don't believe it has its own kernel module or anything, right?

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Dogs do unconditional love. With cats, in my experience, it is usually very conditional (on Dreamies/Temptations)

What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack

'Send email' would have been a bit of a tall order for most shareware users in the early 80s, to be fair.

Brit universities told to keep up the world-class research with less cash

Re: @VicMortimer

We had by modern standards sky high income taxes for people on very high incomes after World War Two and you know what? By and large they did not all just leave the country.

Malware in Lisp? Now you're just being cruel

Re: Lisp is in an amazing number of places

PostScript was essentially in the FORTH family. Long since generally replaced by PDF, but you'll still see it around now and then.