Posts by theOtherJT

Rollable laptop displays to roll off the production line from April, says Samsung

Re: I don't give a damn about the rollable bit...

I always liked it because it's the 16:10 of the '90s. You get the entire of what would be the 4:3 space as actual desktop plus a little bit extra along the bottom for the taskbar to live in.

I don't give a damn about the rollable bit...

...I just want to be able to buy a premium quality laptop with a 5:4 screen again. Can we please just have those back please?

Short-lived bling, dumb smart things, and more: The worst in show from CES 2025

Re: Nobody asked for this...

The Register launched in 1994. 25 years ago we already had el Reg. Went online in '98 IIRC. Was definitely reading it in '99.

Re: Nobody asked for this...

OK, I'll give you e-books. I actually do use one of those all the time - but only as a convenience. I still buy everything in dead-tree form, I just leave them on the bookshelf when I'm not at home because I don't want to damage them, so if I had to give that up I don't think I'd mind.

Re: making an essential appliance too damn complicated

I can see that happening.

My dad has a freezer in his garage. It's older than me. It has two lights on it, and precisely zero controls. You turn it on, and the red and orange lights come on. When it's cold, the red light goes out, and the orange light stays on to inform you that it's on power. That's it. It does one thing: Keep things frozen. It does the job so perfectly it's been out there for the last 21 years doing it with no maintenance or alteration - and for the 24 years before that it was in the kitchen doing the same thing. The only reason it's not still in the kitchen is that mum wanted to redecorate and it was too big to fit once everything had been moved around.

What could this thing possibly be served by having "AI"? It doesn't even need a temperature dial in it, because as soon as you turn it on it heads down to to -18 C which was considered by it's manufacturer 50 years ago to be the temperature that a freezer should be. That's still the temperature freezers should be. Why set it to something else? There is literally no way to improve this thing by making it more complicated.

Nobody asked for this...

...is basically the motto of the 21st century at this point.

I might be a grumpy old man... well, no, I most definitely am a grumpy old man... but looking back at the life I lived as a young adult in 2000 these last 25 years don't really seem to have improved anything. I guess having google maps in my pocket is pretty nice, but I'm coming up really short when I look for other major wins. Things that actually genuinely make my life easier on a daily basis. All this technology, and how is it actually doing anything that makes my - or for that matter anyone else's life - better?

The ultimate Pi 5 arrives carrying 16GB ... and a price to match

Re: At that price...

Well, that's kinda my point. The Pi is about - for me at least - cheap tinkering type devices where you get easily accessible GPIO in a low power low cost platform. I don't really see how putting 16G on a pi will be much use to anyone who isn't trying to use it as a "desktop" and if you are trying to use it as a desktop it seems like you'd be better served with something else. It just seems a bit... unnecessary. There's always a use somewhere for basically anything under the sun, but I'm kinda struggling to see the point of this one.

At that price...

...it's starting to get close to the little N100 boxes that are basically everywhere these days. I guess if you particularly needed arm rather than x86 for some workload it's nice to have that option, or maybe if you have a lot of PI compatible HATs or similar that you want to reuse, but I can't see that for most people the pi would be a better way to go. Once you're up in the £150 area (which appears to be what one would cost from pihut including a case, SD card, and power supply) the intel machine is just that much more capable and basically the same price. If you're not constantly thrashing the hell out of it it's not even significantly more power hungry.

Elon Musk's galactic ego sows chaos in European politics

Re: Musk uses an AI for his X-account

No, pretty sure he's just on a shit-ton of ketamine.

Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'

Re: "Not that users have much of a choice to move with Microsoft to a Windows 11 world"

The thing is, while this is true, MS don't care. Both my parents use Ubuntu with Mate now because they find it to be more like the Windows they remember than the new Windows is, and it gives them less problems along the way. Good-o. Job done.

But MS makes basically no money from end users like them. Windows is what it is because of corporate market share, and getting Linux to stick as an option in the office requires paperwork. Oh god so much paperwork. And meetings. The endless meetings. It doesn't matter than 99% of the office staff do everything in a browser these days, trying to convince a corporate IT department to try and run their estate on Linux is basically impossible - and I say this as someone who has, in fact, run an entire corporate IT department on Linux.

As long as MS can rely on forced upgrades in the business sphere, they can bully the end user as much as they like.

Re: It's like this

I'll pay the extra 20% so I don't have to put up with Microsoft's bullshit. I don't like it, but if that's the choice then that's the choice.

...I mean, I won't - not me personally - because I'll just keep using Ubuntu, but if maintaining our in-house Linux distro wasn't literally my job and I was someone who just went to a store to be presented with "Mac or Windows" I'd chose Apple every time given what Windows has become.

Windows 11 24H2 can run – sort of – in 184MB

Re: Imagine the world we'd be living in...

To be fair, it's pretty hard to get an entire OS running in single digits of ram when you have to take into account as many hardware variants as we have today. You'd be back at the whole "compile your kernel for the precise hardware you intend to run on" stage - which I personally could do without going back to.

Imagine the world we'd be living in...

...if companies developing software actually put in as much effort as this guy has. Especially in today's world of microservices and containers, if you could actually get an entire OS running in megabytes of memory it would make everything so much more efficient.

Can AWS really fix AI hallucination? We talk to head of Automated Reasoning Byron Cook

Re: Only a little bit wrong

Code. It's called code.

This is why we have formal language specifications for doing coding. I translate what I intend to mean in English that has multiple potential interpretations into something formally complete that means precisely one thing such that the compiler/interpreter will always do the same thing when presented with it.

Re: Hallucination aka Wrong

I like "Gaslighting" because not only does it make things up, it has a shocking tendency to lie about it when pressed.

"Cook says it was not quite the kind of hallucination the automated reasoning tool could solve."

...except that's precisely the kind that actually matters. It made something up. Something that did not in fact happen.

It's not a question like "Is The Black Album good?" to which there really is no answer, because the judgement is aesthetic. You can hate it, or love it, you could argue about if the mix is technically good perhaps for a particular vinyl or CD release... but is it good? Well, you like it or not I guess.

Ultimately the latter question is unimportant for AI to answer, because it's unimportant for anyone to answer. There isn't an answer. But inventing things and asserting them as facts? Kinda more important that one.

Dude, you got a Dell, period! RIP XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision

Re: I'll care about anything Dell does...

Mine doesn't, it's at the top of the screen where it's belongs, but I think the 2019 model did that IIRC.

I'll care about anything Dell does...

...when they put the keyboards on the XPS or whatever the hell they want to call that line back the way they were. 2022 XPS 15 - best laptop I've ever had. Tried the new 16. Hated it. Absolutely impossible to type on accurately.

Edit: And give me my damn function keys back!

Tech support warrior left cosplay battle and Trekked to the office

Re: What's the weirdest outfit you've worn to a tech support job?

I used to do that all the time. I particularly liked the bit where I discovered that the "pocket" for the back protector plate in my jacket was the perfect size to slip a 15" laptop in over the plate. I could rock up on site and then just unzip the bottom of the jacket and drop the laptop straight out onto the work bench without having to try and get a laptop bag secured to the bike.

Did occasionally get a few stares from people stomping through the office with a helmet on and steel toed boots, but no one ever said anything.

systemd begrudgingly drops a safety net while a challenger appears, GNU Shepherd 1.0

Re: 42% less unix philosophy

As regards Windows servers, I'm sure there are plenty of old hands out there who learned how to do the job and do it well without powershell - given how late to the party Microsoft were with that one - but I've spent god knows how much time cleaning up messes caused by giving people who can't be trusted with it shell access. It does rather feel like if someone doesn't want to learn the basics, giving them the power to do real damage is a bad idea, and that's a problem that is most definitely not solved by getting them to understand less.

Re: 42% less unix philosophy

Try it. Seriously. Try and actually force systemd to do genuinely, completely, synchronous boot up with hard guarantees on every single component coming up in exactly the order you asked for and providing a signal that proves it did it.

It's a complete and absolute nightmare. The response from the systemd dev team when trying to do this is oftentimes "Well, why would you do that?" when we've filed bug reports, but frankly that's not good enough. Some times it absolutely does matter - especially when dealing with embedded systems with really quirky hardware. Boot speed be damned I HAVE to have these services start in precisely this order, and signal that they have done so. Systemd will absolutely lie about this in some of the weirder edge cases - and yes, everything has edge cases - but the good thing about sysvinit is that they're all odd bashisms that we know about and are easy to work around. When systemd does it it's really, really hard to get to the bottom of why it did, and even if you do and can prove conclusively that it's a bug, the systemd team will sort of shrug at you and suggest that it's not their problem.

BOFH: Don't sell The Boss a firewall. Sell him The Dream

Re: The Dream

Comment of the year. Doubly so given that I can smell the river from my house today. Thames Water clearly doing their usual excellent job.

Reddit rolls out AI-powered 'Answers' search feature, redditors don't rejoice

Amazing!

They've actually found a way to make the Reddit search less effective. I genuinely didn't think that was possible given how low the bar they were starting from was, but here we are.

Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas

Re: Keyboard layout

You mean the objectively better one where we get one more key than you do?

Given that the monitor can run from 5 volts...

...and therefore be chained from the Pi itself, all we need is to add PoE and what we have here is a single-cable machine. I like to imagine a room full of them netbooting a nice thin-client OS and attaching to a chonky heavy-lift compute rack in the basement. Everything old is new again. It'd be like being back at school.

Altman to Musk: Don't go full supervillain – that's so un-American

Surely that's the most American.

This is what Americans do. This is peak American. Stop pretending it's some golden age that never existed when America was the hero. If America was ever that, it sure as shit ain't now.

Brits are scrolling away from X and aren't that interested in AI

Re: It's not just Brits...

Who says they do? I don't, never have, but I have to listen to his constant mental diarrhea because it's never out of the fucking news.

M4 MacBook Pro shows Apple is still glued to the idea of unfixable laptops

Re: Apple, the fashion brand that makes computers

I agree with your headline assumption - that's totally what they are - but I don't think the evidence bears out what you have to say about service life. Most Apple kit seems to last a good long time. They have many faults, but I don't think that's one of them.

I still have no idea...

...why they glue these things down. It's not like there's huge amounts of space in there for the battery to be rattling around in. When it's in, it's in. Once it's in place the back of the machine would hold it in, there's nowhere for it to go! Put some bloody sprung contacts under it and a couple of bits of foam and you wouldn't even need a lead to connect it to. The only reason for this is being deliberately obstructive.

Microsoft goes thin client with $349 Windows 365 Link mini PC

Re: So, double the price...

Thing is, it has local storage. You, the consumer, may not be allowed to use it but it must have it. It's own operating system needs to live there. At minimum there's got to be something on this thing that does enough management of network interfaces to get the thing online so it can pull disk images. In the modern corporate environment it'll at least WPA-2/3 type wifi to get an internet connection, and in a lot of places you'll need some sort client that relies on connect then authenticate webauth like workflows. To bring something like that up you need enough brains to detect and configure the display - unless it comes with a known type of display - which for $350 it doesn't, and by the looks of it it supports wireless input devices, so now we're looking at a bluetooth stack too likely as not.

It's all a reasonable amount of things to stash in an initrd type filesystem so it's not like it's going to need a lot of local storage, but it'll need some and it can't be read-only because it'll need to get security patches just like any other initramfs would. The only way around that would be to allow it to PXE boot - which no one in their right mind is ever going to allow over the internet.

Re: So, double the price...

Yes. That's kinda my point.

It's double the price of a much more useful device that can do everything this does, and more. If I were so inclined I could have locked the machine down even more such that all it let you do was terminal services stuff, but the only case I can think of where that would be desirable is if I were really worried about the end users copying files on and off the remote endpoints. That's a really niche case, and again, one that's already covered by cheaper commodity hardware.

And the OS on this... thing... is still going to need patching because this is way too complex a device to be totally static.

Re: So, double the price...

I'd be willing to buy that argument except for the way that it's going to be 100% proven false when we get our hands on the things. If you baked everything it was capable of doing into hardware - proper vt220 terminal style - then you could argue that it'd be very secure. But they're not going to do that, are they? Because to actually connect to the internet and Microsoft's cloud services it's going to need a fairly deep software stack, and that software stack will contain bugs, and that means they're going to release patches.

I absolutely guarantee that in there will be a totally normal - albeit possibly arm based - machine running a stripped down version of Windows itself. Sure, it might have secure boot turned on, it might have a properly signed software stack - but we can already do that on a normal machine. What we won't find in there is the entire set of software necessary to make it work baked into an eprom. Hell, the software stack necessary to detect the proper resolution and colour depth of whatever monitors happen to be attached to it is too complex to be hard-coded into firmware with any degree of confidence that it'll work properly long term.

So, double the price...

...of any of those tiny form-factor n100 boxes that you can get basically everywhere these days, which can run a real operating system and drive a pair of 4K displays.

Which does rather leave one asking "Why?". I mean, do in fact use said little N100 boxes as terminal service machines, but they can also boot Ubuntu.

In fact that's how I use them as terminal service machines. Log in with your regular network credentials, run the "terminal services" application, get presented with a list of remote machines you can use to do heavy compute on if you need to - alternatively all your email and web browsing needs can be met right here. In fact the vast majority of non GPU related needs can be met right here, because it's a fucking 3GHZ machine with 16G of ram. For $175.

Study suggests X turned right just in time for election season

This post has been deleted.

[This operation was performed by a moderation algorithm]

Seem familiar anyone?

We need to strip social media of the pretense that algorithms are moderation. They're required by law to do something about hate speech and disinformation on their platforms, but they abdicate that responsibility to algorithms that regularly do the exact opposite. For some reason they keep getting away with this.

Windows 95 setup was three programs in a trench coat, Microsoft vet reveals

Re: "the excitement of installing Windows 95 for the first time"

"Hi! We're glad you're here!"

Are you? Are you microsoft? Because I'm bloody not. I'm not glad I'm here at all. I'm here because the students have managed to get into the local administrator accounts again and this room has to be re-installed from scratch before this afternoon's lecture and I have another two dozen machines to do, so I don't want to hear about how happy you are that I'm here.

God I hated those machines. I hated them doubly so because the college wouldn't spring for any kind of remote imaging tools, so it was muggins here (and a student temp if I could steal one from kitchen duty) who had to go around the whole lab and re-install them from CD - yes, actual spinning disks - every time some smartass found a new elevate privileges exploit for the sodding things and messed them all up.

Academic papers yanked after authors found to have used unlicensed software

Re: JStor

I'd totally forgotten about that abomination and you just caused me to have a nasty flashback to my postgraduate days. God I hate JStor.

Mozilla's Firefox browser turns 20. Does it still matter?

Re: Is FF relevant?

In my experience common sense rarely enters into business policy making.

Re: Is FF relevant?

Genuinely curious as to what led to that policy.

Re: those who believe in choice, privacy, and transparency

I can, will, and do.

When the choice is between "a" and "b" and one of them is obviously a fucking disaster, it's a false choice so it doesn't count.

When the choice is between "a", "b", "c", and "getting shit rubbed in your eyes" I can totally blame people for picking a face full of shit if all the other choices do variants on the same theme, but come shit free.

California's last nuclear plant turns to generative AI for filing and finding the fine print

Sounds like an expensive, and unreliable way...

...to do the job that could be handled by a couple of relatively low paid full time archivists to me.

You remember those, the people we used to pay to know where all the technical documentation was and keep it properly indexed and up to date?

Europe's largest local authority slammed for 'poorest' ERP rollout ever

Re: Just Too Much

This happens because basically no one ever who sells finance / HR / stock control / sales / pick-a-thing software has ever grasped the concept of bulk data import and export. You end up with some utter freaking monstrosity of a product that does "all the things" because it means you don't have to do some variation of this:

• Open the finance package, select the record you want, select "export" and get a CSV file for that one record.
• Now open the sales package and find your project, select "Import" and discover that it can't read from CSVs but only imports in it's own custom format - which turns out to be json in a zip file. This is undocumented and takes weeks to discover.
• Write an awful and only mostly functional excel macro that can take that CSV and turn it into JSON.
• Run the output through winzip (free, unregistered) edition because you've been using it since 2002.
• Feed that into the import function of the sales package.
• Repeat this process, by hand, several hundred times introducing a ton of minor errors where the Excel macro didn't quite do the right job, or indeed some major errors because the office drone doing the manual data entry got distracted by a phone call part way through and attached the wrong version of the file.

I have lost track of how many examples of this sort of shit I've encountered over the years. When you ask "Why are you doing this?" and the answer is that there's no standard input/output handling for any of the involved packages.

Occasionally I've managed to write the odd short program that can do this sort of thing, but I did on one occasion do so and reduce what was a week long task performed by the admin office of one academic institution I worked for into a "Run this program and then type in your password. Watch the progress bar for approximately 15 seconds." type process. I was told that they couldn't possibly use it and that I should never tell anyone, because as things were they had a whole member of extra staff assigned to them during the first month of the year to handle this, and they didn't want to lose the headcount and associated bump to the department budget.

When Windows Server 2025 is delivered like it's 1999, nobody gets to party

Most of the reason you can't replace a single library without a reboot is that as far as I can tell there's no actual tracking of what services and applications might be using them. Dependency management is one of the killer features of proper package management - I want to update lib-foo, and I know that app-bar is using it because it says so in its "depends:" section, so I check if app-bar is running right now, and if it is I'm going to warn the user that it's going to need to be restarted, and offer to do that for them.

This just isn't any part of Windows update because you have absolutely no idea what may or may not be installed or what dependencies it might have since so much software under windows is installed by virtue of "Download this executable and run it. No don't ask what it's going to do. It installs. That's all you need to know."

Personally this has always really annoyed me, because it's not like Windows has no mechanism for tracking things like this - it does - and the MSI package format is quite capable of carrying all the requisite information. It's just that even Microsoft themselves can't be bothered to use it half the time and don't use it consistently when they do.

That position you just applied for might be a 'ghost job' that'll never be filled

Re: Tle Law is A Ass

Somewhat astonishingly the University of Nottingham has a campus in Malaysia.

Re: Tle Law is A Ass

Hah, we worked in public education. No one got bonuses.

Re: Tle Law is A Ass

I've been on the ugly flipside of this where the requirement to advertise externally was used as an excuse to not fill a vacant position and keep the department running two members of staff short rather than promote anyone.

We're already down a member of staff because our pay was a joke, and this pisses off the team lead to the point where they quit. Now we need a new team lead and another sysadmin. All us regular sysadmins are on grade 7, but the team lead is a grade 8 position. Well, who wants to spend the extra money on having a grade 8 leading the team when they can just leave the vacancy open because "We're advertising externally" for a couple of months while all team lead's work is distributed around the rest of us who already work there for free?

Once they finally accepted that the sensible thing to do was promote me because I was defacto team lead in the absence of anyone else, I get promoted - nice for me - but according to HR this means that my position is now vacant and we have to advertise that as a new vacancy starting all over again and taking another 2 months to advertise, interview, negotiate etc. rather than offer my old job to any of the various applicants who I had already interviewed who wouldn't make the cut as lead, but would have been perfectly good hires for the existing regular sysadmin post.

I'm sure the HR team were very proud of saving two full salaries for about 9 months with this shit, while the entire IT team were slowly burning out and losing the will to live.

Linus Torvalds: 90% of AI marketing is hype

Not sure it would, no. Because I'm not sure it can. I think the way it behaves is pretty much a fundamental feature of the system.

This is why we can't have nice things...

...$95 billion on AI in a single year. The cost of the entire ITER experiment is estimated to come out at about $40 billion over it's lifetime.

Which do we think would change humanity for the better, clean, effectively limitless power, or the ability to mash-up content created by other people to create new content that's only sometimes accurate and never innovative?

We constantly prioritize shiny bullshit over things that are actually useful. God I'm depressed.

Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Re: I have

Simple solution: Burn down all the forests.

Alphabet posts big revenue and profit growth, just 1,100 job losses

This would explain...

...the marked decline in the quality of their services over the last couple of years.

I swear Google search gets less and less useful by the day and their cloud services become quirkier and buggier with every release

Someone's finally taking on £10M Hull City Council ERP deal to replace Oracle

Re: "the Council is expecting to accrue [..] £1 million [..] digital efficiency saving each year"

Because, Bernard, once you create genuinely democratic local communities it won't stop there.