* Posts by Paul Smith

549 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jul 2007

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An awful lot of FOSS should thank the Academy

Paul Smith

Oh crap, you've got a NAN

Stunning!

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

Paul Smith

Proposal for new El Reg unit of measure

I propose El Reg adopts the term "Putin-Sized" for describing stupidly large but worthless quantities. Example usage: "Trump claims to have won by a PutinSized margin".

JPMorgan Chase sues scammers following viral 'infinite money glitch'

Paul Smith

Wow, something is seriously wrong here.

ATM withdrawals have daily limits. Even very generous daily limits are not going to allow you to withdraw $300,000 dollars in the time it takes to clear a check!

NASA will fly Boeing Starliner crew home with SpaceX, Calamity Capsule deemed too risky

Paul Smith

In what way do you think they are divorced? The risk of the shares plummeting because the Starliner crashes and burns and kills two astronauts killed has been removed. Of course that improves the share outlook.

Paul Smith

Re: Why continue?

I think Boeing has already burned through a lot of its protectors recently.

'Gay furry hackers' say they've disbanded after raiding Project 2025's Heritage Foundation

Paul Smith

Re: So where's the light?

Or 666?

War on Texas law requiring ID to savor smut online heads to Supreme Court

Paul Smith

Re: A paradox

Actual Christians follow Christ's advice to "love thy neighbour" and "turn the other cheek". The other camp are the "eye for an eye" and "Do what I tell you or be damned to hellfire".

Suspected radiation alert saboteurs cuffed by cops after sensors disabled

Paul Smith
Mushroom

Re: The bigger problem

The whole point of the Arpanet, the parent of the internet, was that it would survive a nuclear catastrophe. Where else would you put sensors designed to detect such a catastrophe?

Boeing's Starliner finds yet another way to not reach space

Paul Smith

Re: What was the fault?

Read the article. They needed three supplies for a launch, one failed AND THE REDUNDANT SUPPLY DID NOT ACTIVATE.

IT consultant-cum-developer in court over hiding COVID-19 loan

Paul Smith

£21 billion lost to fraud

"It seems that Jastrzebski's case is going to add this to the ever growing list of both financial misconduct and fraud committed by scumbags that exploited the pandemic. It is estimated that £21 billion ($25.96 billion) of public money was lost to fraud, according to the National Audit Office."

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice and you have a display of stunning incompetence and probably significant collusion. Just as long the National Audit Office is not using Horizon software. They aren't, are they?

Paul Smith

"Tackling Bounce Back Loan misconduct is a key priority for the Insolvency Service."

No, I think you will find that insolvency is the key priority of the Insolvency Service. The clue was in the name.

Senator Warren slams Intuit's 'junk fees' as America's Tax Day rolls around again

Paul Smith

It is an ad, and it's not for me.

'nuff said.

Notepad++ dev slams Google-clogging notepad.plus 'parasite'

Paul Smith

Re: Always Download Directly From Source?

How many people do you think are going to go to the original site to get a hash so that they can manually check the legitimacy of a download they got from somewhere other then the original site? Even the people who upvoted your answer won't do that.

No joke: FTC boss goes on the Daily Show and is told Apple tried to block her

Paul Smith

Re: USA Free Market

That is fine up until the point you need to import something when the price becomes whatever the seller demands, and if they don't value dollars ...

UK health department republishes £330M Palantir contract with fewer ██████

Paul Smith

An IT system for £1

What could possibly go wrong?

Swift enters safe mode over gyro issue while NASA preps patch to shake it off

Paul Smith

Re: Hot or cold spares?

Solid state gyros are used to determine orientation, not to influence it.

French cloud Scaleway starts renting Alibaba's RISC-V SoC

Paul Smith

Using a chip from China

"Using a chip from China – a nation credibly suspected of using its presence in tech supply chains to enable economic espionage – is an interesting way to establish sovereignty and free users from geopolitical constraints."

Obviously safer than to using chips from the USA, a nation categorically proven to use its presence in tech supply chains to enable economic espionage.

SBF likely off the hook for misplaced FTX funds after cops bust SIM swap ring

Paul Smith

FTX theft...

"Powell was reportedly arrested in Chicago last week and is being held without bond "

If I had successfully stolen $400 million, I would a) not still be in Chicago in mid-winter and b) have a sufficiently good lawyer that the idea of being denied bail was laughable.

FBI confirms it issued remote kill command to blow out Volt Typhoon's botnet

Paul Smith

Re: Thanks for nothing

Why would you presume that they would limit themselves this time?

JetBrains' unremovable AI assistant meets irresistible outcry

Paul Smith

Bad grammer is usually an indication that something was written by an actual human.

US Navy sailor swaps sea for cell after accepting bribes from Chinese snoops

Paul Smith

Black adder goes forth...

Captain Darling:

So you see, Blackadder, Field Marshall Haig is most anxious to eliminate all these German spies.

General Melchett:

Filthy hun weasels, fighting their dirty underhand war!

Captain Darling:

And fortunately, one of our spies...

General Melchett:

Splendid fellows, brave heroes risking life and limb for Blighty!

OpenAI: 'Impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials'

Paul Smith

Straw man argument

The training of the AI is a straw man argument. Using material to train an AI model is not a problem and is *not* a misuse of copyright assuming they have legitimate and legal access to the material in the first place. It is the use of copyrighted material in the output, without permission, payment, or accreditation that is the problem. If openAI can't build a business model that respects other peoples property and rights, then they don't have a business.

China bans export of rare earth processing kit

Paul Smith

Re: "unproven spying from Huawei equipment"

If there was any actual evidence that Huawei had done any of the things they are accused of, it would be splashed across every front page on the planet. A decade ago, Snowden proved that US TLA's subverted US companies to do exactly the things Huawei is accused of, and by all appearances, it is still ongoing.

Artificial intelligence is a liability

Paul Smith

Re: As You Were

There is enough quality pron to suit all tastes available for free. Why would you want to pay for SI and have to put up with the extra Lorem Ipsum?

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

Paul Smith

Sorry, but that is simply not true, get yourself some faster storage. I have a dual boot PC running a 5800X. Cold boot to login, Windows 11 or Ubuntu is five or six seconds with SSD boot disk depending on the password. In 1984, it took longer then that just for the CRT to warm up.

Amazon's game-streamer Twitch to quit South Korea, citing savage network costs

Paul Smith

Re: is this better for SK Broadband?

Last time I checked, electricity companies charged me for access to electricity, and charged me for how much I used and charged me at different rates for when I used it. It also charges different rates to the small business next door and the large factory down the road so there is nothing new or original in customer based charging. The toll road doesn't charge based on the contents of the truck but they do charge based on the size and weight of the truck and sometimes on when the truck wants to travel. Telcos are not suggesting charging for the contents of your downloads (cat videos are the same price as pussy videos) but they would like a share based on the size of the download. Why should they have to bare the total cost of upgrading to 1Gig+ fibre to the door just so you can watch an 8K UHD grumble flick? Does it really look much better then 720i?

Government and the latest tech don't mix, says UK civil servant of £11B ESN mess

Paul Smith

Clueless

I don't expect elected politicians to be experts at anything other then getting elected, but I have to ask why they are so consistently incapable of surrounding themselves with knowledgeable advisors?

It's ba-ack... UK watchdog publishes age verification proposals

Paul Smith

Swearing is the choice of those with a limited vocabulary.

If you only know one swear word, then your vocabulary is clearly limited.

The true definition of a polylinguist is someone who can swear fluently in multiple languages.

Half a kilo of cosmic nuclear fuel reignites NASA's deep space dreams

Paul Smith

Re: significantly lower power degradation over time

88 Year half life means half of it will still be generating heat and power in 88 years time, and half of what's left will still be working 88 years after that, not really much of a constraint.

FBI Director: FISA Section 702 warrant requirement a 'de facto ban'

Paul Smith

Re: Warrant phobia

After over 20 years of this they very clearly do not *need* to change anything. If the need was real, the elected politicians that didn't change would have been replaced by elected politicians that did change.

Regrettably, one of the consequences of democracy is that you get the politicians you deserve. The American public is (en masse) happy with lying, spying, fear and corruption and their politicians reflect that.

As the Top500 celebrates its 30th year, with a $5 VM you too can get into the top 10 ... of 1993

Paul Smith

Moore's law

The first PC I worked on was a IBM clone ((Olivetti I think) in 1984. It ran an 8086 at 4.77MHz and cost about £1,500 (all in).

Today my home PC is a running a 5800X at 4.7GHz and would cost about £1,500 to build from scratch tomorrow.

Moore's law (double the performance for the same price every 18 months) equates to about 42% per year. 39 years at 42% starting from 1 gives 869,451.64

My current PC is about a million times more powerful then that first one so Moore's law is still holding.

Paul Smith

But can it run Cryses?

A raspberry Pi 4 has over 4GFLOPS while a Pi 5 is reported to have over 10GFlops.

Kubernetes' Tim Hockin on a decade of dominance and the future of AI in open source

Paul Smith

And the alternative is... ?

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Paul Smith

Placement, and replacement.

Paul Smith

Irish planning law has insisted for years that meters can be read without having to enter the premises and the sky hasn't fallen in. Perhaps you could suggest something similar to your local councillors.

Paul Smith
FAIL

No corruption here.

Not only will nobody loose their job over this, but I expect everybody involved to still receive their full bonus.

If the Linux Foundation was a software company, it'd be the biggest in the world

Paul Smith
Devil

Re: Wrong

Linux is obsolete? Are you sure? You do know that "obsolete" means no longer used, and last time I checked, Linux was still being used quite a lot.

Spawn of Satan icon because it looks like a handbag :)

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Paul Smith

They say you get the politicians you deserve.

There is an apocryphal story of the man on the Clapham omnibus being asked if he would vote for a politician being accused of corruption. "Of course", said the man, "if he can't look after himself, how can I expect him to look after me?"

The Tories may be corrupt, but at least they can look after themselves.

The world seems so loopy. But at least someone's written a memory-safe sudo in Rust

Paul Smith

Re: Explain

Why are you so keen on pushing the merits of a fifty year old computer from a company that ceased to exist over twenty years ago? This obsessive equine flagellation flagrantly promoting obsolete obscurities lacks relevance to the topics at hand.

Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data

Paul Smith
FAIL

Re: Where are the backups? @AC re:"still writable"

"...the TSM server is the only one that can manipulate the tapes,"

Ever had to deal with a TSM server with a misaligned head that decided to develop another fault?

Google launches $99 a night Hotel Mountain View for hybrid workers

Paul Smith

Re: I spy a business opportunity

Security guards on minimum wages are not always as conscientious as their employers might wish.

Cops cuff pregnant woman for carjacking after facial recog gets it wrong, again

Paul Smith

"No reason to assume she was a criminal." If you believe that a stranger is simply someone you haven't met yet, then you are right, she is innocent until proven guilty and all that. If, however, you believe a stranger is a threat, and many people including police training officers do, then you get guilt by association laws and a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.

Paul Smith

Some US states have guilt by association laws. If a person (even a heavily pregnant person) handled a mobile phone in that turned out to have been stolen (handing it in is still handling it), that is sufficient to allow her to be associated with the original crime.

SEC lawsuit against Terraform Labs and cofounder Do Kwon lives to fight another day

Paul Smith

huh?

The US cigarette and tobacco industry revenue in 2022 was $52bn. (https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/market-size/cigarette-tobacco-manufacturing-united-states/).This one single crypto company lost $42 billion all on its own. For a judge to say it can not be compared in importance is ridiculous!

Now Apple takes a bite out of encryption-bypassing 'spy clause' in UK internet law

Paul Smith

Re: "Strong" encryption?

Strong encryption is any encryption where the cost in money/time/effort to crack exceeds the value of the information retrieved.

Since the value of the information being protected is variable, the relative strength of the encryption used is also variable. ROT-13 is strong enough to protect my Christmas present shopping list from my children's prying eyes this year, but might not be strong enough next year.

Posing as journalists, Pink Drainer pilfers $3.3M in crypto

Paul Smith
Joke

Re: @Neil Barnes - someone lost almost $320,000 in stolen non-fungible tokens (NFTs)

Wouldn't it be justice if the thief who sold the NFTs in the first place had been paid with stolen crypto.

Nvidia's RTX 4060 and 4060TI are actually priced like mid-tier cards

Paul Smith

I bought my 1060 in May 2017 so at six years old, it is definitely is getting a little long in the tooth but in all that time, this is the first card that I have even looked twice at as an upgrade. I am still not convinced and going fro 6G to only 8G is not going to do it for me. That said, it will have to get some pretty amazing reviews if I am going to even consider spending €400 on it.

It's time to reveal all recommendation algorithms – by law if necessary

Paul Smith

Re: Are these much hyped algorithms really that complicated?

If you searched for X, Y, Z, W...

you are categorized into the group of people that searched for X,Y,Z,W...

we will offer you more of what you have already searched for (eg ads for products you bought last month)

or

we will offer you what others in your category searched for that you did haven't (ads for things they bought that you haven't).

if we don't know enough about you to put you into a category,

we will offer you random shit.

Today's old folks set to smash through longevity records

Paul Smith

Absence of evidence

For all of human history, there have been rare individuals that lived 100+ years. The average life expectancy is increasing, not because people can live longer then before, but because less people are dying early.

Yes, Samsung 'fakes' its smartphone Moon photos – who cares?

Paul Smith

What a laugh...

I confess to getting a giggle from all the photography nerds discussing the impossibility of such photos as if the 5 stop range of film applied to digital cameras as well. It doesn't. The most spectacular shots I have taken in the last few years were not on my Nikon (which has been effectively retired) but on first a Pixel 4 and then a Pixel 6. What made them spectacular was the phones ability to work in a range of lighting in dawn, dusk or night conditions. Detail in the shadows. Getting a good shot of the moon is not hard if you switch to manual. Getting a good shot of the moon and what ever was going on that made it interesting, is a real challenge to even expert photographers, but is something that digital phones can do quite well.

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