* Posts by MyffyW

2330 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2013

Microsoft open sources Windows Subsystem for Linux – well, most of it

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Bassackward?

There is (as others have noted) a long history with Windows NT and it's derivatives:

One of my personal faves was File and Print Services for NetWare which made your Windows NT Server appear as a NetWare 2.x file server. Which led to some interesting edge-cases when migrating off of NetWare 3, having your clients think they were connecting to an even older NetWare server.

Microsoft-backed AI out-forecasts hurricane experts without crunching the physics

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Point it at the stock exchange data

Or indeed the horse-racing form guide.

I worked with a gentleman who put his acknowledged data skills to predicting horse races. And for a time (many race meetings) he won more than he lost. But eventually the fund he was manging on behalf of himself and his optimistic colleagues went into the red and stubbornly resolved to remain irrational longer than he could remain solvent. He is currently an advocate for Cryptocurrency. Make of that what you will...

Apartment living to get worse in 5 years as 6 GHz Wi-Fi nears ‘exhaustion’

MyffyW Silver badge

actually, just recalled the AUI do-hickies they were called "transceivers"

MyffyW Silver badge

Can I be the first to ask for a token-ring adapter for my smartphone? With the proper IBM type 1 plug on it and those thick, fiendishly inflexible black cables?

Failing that I'd like an AUI ethernet adapter. I loved those things because they came in such cute old-fashioned little cardboard boxes.

China finds a previously unknown microbe on its space station

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: So it likes a nice jelly but

Life will ... find a way

Microsoft revives DOS-era Edit in a modern shell

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: "superseded Edlin"

It definitely wasn't in MS-DOS 3.3, as I recall having to master EDLIN. And by "master" I mean mangle many a source file with my neophyte ability to find all the rough edges.

MS-DOS 5 was a work of beauty by comparison, and 6.22 a summit I wasn't to surpass until NT4 took me into layers of abstraction.

Actors' union complains about Epic Games cloning Darth Vader

MyffyW Silver badge

The union are looking after the collective rights of their members (or ought to be). These are not always the same as maximising an individual (or individual teams) optimal outcome. I have personal experience of that too.

Unions, they're not always perfect but they are better than nothing.

Next week's SpaceX Starship test still needs FAA authorization

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Picture of Elmo

And after Adolf and Benito used it, what sort of people continued to use it? Nice, fair-minded folk from a broad part of the political spectrum?

MyffyW Silver badge

Picture of Elmo

For any sentient beings who are not fully up to speed the featured picture of That Twat Musk has nothing to do with space exploration and is instead widely interpreted as him copying a fascist salute. I know most of us know this, but no harm in clarifying matters for any visitors from outer space.

Mars may have vast underground oceans and enough H2O to make it a water world

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Just cheese

As someone with a fondness for Mars bars, I can attest to the fact that eating the caramel and nougat (and outer chocolate mantle) only augment your wobbly bits.

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Just cheese

That's the sort of crimethink that got you in trouble with the Federation in the first case, Blake.

CERN boffins turn lead into gold for about a microsecond at unimaginable cost

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Odd how what was "nonsense" is now fact.

Phlogiston as a theory had something to commend it, in that it was repeatable and explained a broad set of phenomena. Interpreted rather narrowly as "the absence of oxygen" it's not factually wrong. It's just better theories supported by a wider set of experiments replaced it.

LegoGPT is here to make your blocky dreams come true

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Dear God in Heaven ... please NO MORE AI ... endless AI crap is too much to bear !!!

I have a fairly Old Testament view on how LLMs could be improved

sudo shutdown -t NOW

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Dear God in Heaven ... please NO MORE AI ... endless AI crap is too much to bear !!!

First they came for the writers, and I don't earn much from writing so I said nothing.

Then they came for the musicians, and I'm a fairly poor pianist, so I said nothing.

Then they came for the Lego nerds. And that, dear reader, is me. And you. And my AC friend above.

Enough, end this madness!!!

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Looking good

I can offer you a recently-warmed craft knife if that would help?

Unending ransomware attacks are a symptom, not the sickness

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: What "massive disruption" did Harrods experience?

Co-op admitted to losing customer data ... that's pretty disruptive in my humble opinion, regardless of whether the shelves remained full.

US Transpo Sec wants air traffic control rebuild in 3 years, asks Congress for blank check

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Re: Amazing ..

Shall I prepare the guest bedroom for Mr and Mrs Cock-up?

Raspberry Pi slices Compute Module 4 prices

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Relentless price increases are not obligatory

The other lunchtime I got a lovely pie for £2.20 from a UK reseller called Sayers. Cooling was an issue though.

Teens maintained a mainframe and it went about as well as you'd imagine

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: fax Feeding the Beast

Perhaps it was rather unique toilet paper?

Google tries to greenwash massive AI energy consumption with another vague nuclear deal

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: 200MW is a good size for an SMR

10atm? That's not great, but it's not terrible.

MyffyW Silver badge

Remind me what the CO2 contributions of the bicycle are compared to the SR-71 Blackbird?

For that matter, how many passenger-miles did we get last year from Lockheed's (retired) strategic reconnaissance marvel? How does that compare to the humble bicycle?

Yes, I'm being deliberately obtuse. And I'm actually an advocate for responsible nuclear power. But the AI bollocks and it's attendant energy race do not and will not contribute to the sum of human happiness. And we would be better off if we accepted that sooner rather than later.

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: The worm has turned....

@DS999 sadly very true.

Sir Humphrey Appleby is no doubt applauding from the hereafter.

Commodore OS 3 is the loudest Linux yet

MyffyW Silver badge

I wish them well...

...but I think this is the very opposite reason I became and remain interested in Linux.

That said, I support their freedom to do all this tripped-out craziness. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

Brewhaha: Turns out machines can't replace people, Starbucks finds

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Short skirts

sigh

Linux in Excel? Sure, why not ruin both

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Some men...

I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter.

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: The idea of...

I am left wondering at what point elephants standing on the back of turtles is involved in this Russian-doll-like chicanery

Artist formerly known as Indian Business Machines pledges $150B for US ops, R&D

MyffyW Silver badge

The '90s Thinkpad was an ok laptop. It's docking station was a piece of crap that failed to connect to the (IBM Token Ring) network more often than it succeeded.

The AS/400 was a perfectly reasonable mini-computer.

The pSeries UNIX kit was nice as an alternative to the other vendor UNIXes (back when that was a thing).

Even the xSeries (x86) servers weren't too bad (but HP was better IMHO).

Their services business, despite employing some sincere individuals, was God-awful.

So a sort of "Meh" for the 80s, 90s and early 2000s from me.

Google goes cold on Europe: Stops making smart thermostats for continental conditions

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Again

All of them, every single faux-rad bro, their retail-destroying mail order businesses dressed in ecommerce clothes, their spin-off companies, their other-worldly ambitions as they f~ck this one up.

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Bollocks

Yes, this is an emperor's new clothes moment for Big Tech. They promise the world, but their entire business model is based on their matt-black-and-chrome-crap wearing out quicker than a cheap bra.

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Again

It does assume your - mains connected - nest device runs for more than a couple of years before it fails in many interesting ways because the on-board battery no longer retains enough charge. And whilst it is theoretically possible to replace that battery rather than throw away the whole caboodle, good luck finding the right one even on fleabay.

Nest was a great, innovative company. Google has fracked it up from the first day they took over. I look forward to their eventual demise.

Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: I'e already said this

I do think we've lost sight of quite how revolutionary a "personal" computer was (and indeed still is). The ability to choose, to change and to vote with your feet and your purse is a powerful incentive to genuine* innovation.

[*Generative AI is not innovation]

As ChatGPT scores B- in engineering, professors scramble to update courses

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Deus Ex Machina

I also recommend Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where teaching in the US is an interesting tangent in the author's own journey.

Only 3,000 staff jump from SAP after 10,000 earmarked to be pushed

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: "We've seen about 3,000 people leave," Asam said. "We've rehired some people..."

I've worked with both companies. Despite all the niggles, SAP are eminently preferable to Big Red

When Microsoft made the Windows as a Service pivot

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Lessons skipped and still not enough paranoia

"Parables for Paranoids" from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, 1973

Commercial space station outfit plans two Orbital Data Center nodes by the end of 2025

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Datacenter in space

Cooling on Earth can be challenging, cooling in space is w-a-y more difficult when the only way to shed heat is via radiation.

I am reminded of the quote that the least hospitable part of earth is easier to colonise than the most hospitable part of any other body in this solar system.

The Reg translates the letter in which Oracle kinda-sorta tells customers it was pwned

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: "Oracle completely destroyed their reputation this time"

Reputations can always take a few dings, but to properly lose it takes real effort: you have to show a real contempt for your customers, treat license renewals as a chance to literally suck the lifeblood out of corporate IT budgets, fail to show any real vision and generally enshitten every promising technology your mergers and acquisitions team land you with.

It's not easy, it takes time but I think Big Red may have finally nailed it. I for one will raise a glass and whisper "schadenfreude" to their eventual demise.

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: With the plummeting stock markets...

I'm looking forward to the SEC examining the extended Trump family's share dealings over the last few weeks.

Microsoft resets 'days since last Windows 11 problem' counter to 0

MyffyW Silver badge

Number of days since ...

I am reminded of the background detail on Picard Season 1 where aboard the Romulan-captured Borg cube there reads the sign "Number of days since last assimilation" ... amusing and sinister in equal measure.

Pennsylvania’s once top coal power plant eyed for revival as 4.5GW gas-fired AI campus

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Coal?

The phrase "the gas turbines will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 60-65 percent per megawatt-hour compared to the plant's retired coal units" made me smile wryly.

There would be no need for any of those megawatt-hours if we just stuffed the AI bollocks back into the bottle. I don't need a cutesy AI kitten picture, a written-by-machine lump of prose or any of the other hallucinatory-delusional bobbins.

Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Windows 7 rose to the level

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 with the 32bit TCP/IP support was a perfectly reasonable iteration from the Seattle Software Slinger

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Windows 7 rose to the level

OSR2 if I recall correctly - and yes, poorly :-)

There was a reason I dug my heals in for NT4 (which also didn't have USB, but didn't pretend to)

Musk's xAI swallows Musk's X in ego-friendly, all-stock deal

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: If it quacks like investor fraud...

JP Morgan realised it back in the middle of last year, and their latest target is $120 a share (whilst Tesla is inexplicably trading today around $245).

Current Tesla Price-to-Earnings ratio is 120:1 whilst for normal motor manufacturers 5:1 is more optimistic.

Seriously, this isn't even anti-Musk invective (though I think he's a dick), Tesla is w-a-y overpriced. Tesla is a meme stock buoyed originally by a market-leading product and now dependant (IMHO) on the expectation of favours from the US government.

MyffyW Silver badge

Elmo Edison and the Gangster Capitalists

Worst. Punk. Band. Ever.

Nvidia GPU roadmap confirms it: Moore’s Law is dead and buried

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: a datacenter is a gigawatt

3.6 Gigawatts? Not great. Not terrible.

[alright it actually is a pretty profligate waste of perfectly good electricity]

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: a datacenter is a gigawatt

I am genuinely at a loss to point to a decent value proposition for generative AI. At best it's output is bland and un-inspired, and quite often delusional. Any decently ordered society would be actively discouraging it's use.

Linus Torvalds forgot to release Linux 6.14 for a whole day

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Even if it is "ok" ...

CoPilot response? Windows, of course, albeit with a side-eyed admission that Android is more prevalent.

But I'll stick with the assertion of El Reg in this article.

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: We are human ...

And the better ones of us are quite happy to admit me made a mistake, without any mitigating circumstances or equivocations

Boeing's Starliner future uncertain as NASA weighs next steps

MyffyW Silver badge

...or indeed end the war in Ukraine "in 24 hours".

MyffyW Silver badge

two weeks notice

@WanderingHaggis these twenty-five year old gentlemen would like you to show them to your comms room, hand them your work badge and then leave.