Posts by AMBxx

New Boeing finally gets going, 15 years after debut

Re: Your Boeing to die

Nor me - not flown in nearly 20 years. Sounds even less pleasant now.

UK government investment arm cops to 40-hour leak of officials' contact details

internal management file

aka Excel spreadsheet

Attackers pummel critical WordPress vuln to create all sorts of mischief

Re: Maybe a bit OTT

Not sure why you've been downvoted (comments would be helpful).

I'm in a similar position,I can only connect to the admin and other bits via VPN (tailscale). Everything else is blocked at Cloudflare with a bunch of security rules.

Mozilla speeds Firefox release schedule to biweekly

Re: a 2-week release schedule

You can do unit testing. Testing the whole application? Not so much.

Re: a 2-week release schedule

Biweekly can mean both fortnightly and twice weekly! Just be glad it's only fortnightly.

Zig creator calls Bun’s Claude Rust rewrite ‘unreviewed slop’

Re: What about changes?

Do you mean that a non-AI tool finds code to send to the AI to modify or is one AI model searching the code to send to another?

What about changes?

I've only used AI for small functions that I can review properly. Mostly just the stuff that's a PITA to write.

If you spend $165k to convert this, what happens when you want to make a change? Does it start all over again or do you send over the existing code as the prompt? Surely that large a prompt is going to cost a load all over again?

Is there something 'clever' in the background or does it just keep getting more expensive?

HTTP gets a QUERY method so complex searches can stop pretending to be POST

Re: Losing the H in HTTP.

Old enough to remember when MS thought using port 80 for the MS SQL widget was a clever idea. Was NIMDA the resulting virus?

Re: Idempotent

My formal training was nearly 40 years ago. Very little of what I do now has anything to do with what I learnt all that time ago.

Fact is, we're all amateurs after the first 10 years. Constantly learning new stuff and constantly forgetting old stuff.

UK.gov vows to cut consultancy spending, then hands up to £350M to consultancies

Fair enough

How will they know how to cut consultancy spending if they don't hire consultants to tell them?

Malaysia ponders regulating management of IP addresses

Confused. Same as the rest of us.

Windows 11 turns five, leaving some important lessons for Microsoft

Re: If 11 is bad, imagine what 13 will be

13 won't happen. There was a reason they skipped 9 (nein), so they'll skip 13 too.

What will the release after 68 be called?

Microsoft tells Windows users to get ready for 26H2 – unless they're on 26H1

AI?

Can we turn off all the AI stuff with a single switch? Just moved my laptop to Linux as Win 11 is such a resource hog.

Lessons from the VMwars – nothing virtual about the Broadcom vs Tesco slugfest

Re: Linux Accounting software

Thanks for that. Sadly, I'm not an accountant and Stansoft looks like something from the 80s when you needed some accountancy knowledge to run this stuff.

Re: Pringles & Peroni currently on offer

What Linux alternative did you find? I'm on the last version of QB that came with a perpetual licence. Would much prefer to be able to file my VAT properly.

Smartphone market to shrink 15 percent this year due to memory crisis

Just get me an emulator

If only I could have a decent emulator that I could run on Windows or Linux. I could then just have a simple phone for email and calls.

All the current emulators seem to be resource hogs full of adverts and potentially malware.

Please, someone correct me if I've missed something somewhere.

SQL Server may be too lucrative for Microsoft to ditch, but too legacy to love

Re: SQL is the great leveller

I'm not convinced that SQL is consistent across DBs any more:

Postgres - sort of case sensitive but needs everything to be quoted if you don't want just lower case.

MySQL - what's with the back-ticks (`)?

MS SQL - Top X when everyone else uses limit.

MS SQL (again) - compatibility level? Why can't I just set it for an individual query?

Oracle - doesn't use Top X or limit. Hello to filtering on row numbers

Everyone - dates, times and timestamps - wtf?

Window functions - everyone does a little bit differently.

JSON columns - see Window functions.

We used to have ODBC to do most of the translation between DBs but now with JDBC, I have no idea what to expect if I can get it to work.

Re: Sad to see you go

SSIS, SSAS, SSRS - I don't do much SSAS, but the other two are both end of life. SSIS has gone for some other product I can't remember (I'm on Apache Hop now). SSRS users are being pushed to PowerBI.

if it's not cloud, MS are going to drop it.

Sad to see you go

I've been using MS SQL since 6.5. Now, I'd struggle to recommend anything other than Postgres for relational workloads. If a customer has a budget of £X, I'd rather have all of that rather than £X- SQL licences. Plus, no recurring costs.

MS are losing their ability to enforce vendor lock-in. All that's keeping me on Windows as a client is Outlook and they're trying to break that with the 'New' Outlook with all the stuff I need buggered up.

Windows update leaves third-party Office document launches in limbo

I used it in the days of Windows 3.11. Gave up quickly as it was so unstable. Never thought to look again.

Tesco is sprinting to quit VMware and Broadcom despite rapid migration risks

Re: is this the beginning of the end for VMWARE

NHS Charity customer of mine has just gone VMWare. Apparently, they don't believe the alternatives do what they need.

Not the bit I work on.

Chinese e-tailer claimed 14-inch box stretched the size of a 9-inch tablet

Re: Too good to be true

Yep. It was thanks to the checkout process at Morrisons that my 85 year old dad signed up to gin of the month club.

Instead of mucking about with unenforceable social media bans, the government should be working on these sales practices.

macOS 27 beta boots Asahi Linux off Apple Silicon

Why Linux on Apple?

I am just a humble Windows and Linux user. Could someone who know better, let me know why you'd pay the extra for Apple and then run a different OS? Yes, I know they're pretty but there are plenty of other alternatives if you want a pretty laptop that are much cheaper. Is it just those that are too cool for their own good?

Apple version of Office 2019 becomes useless in a month

WordPerfect?

I used to be a big fan of WordPerfect back in the mid 90s. Stopped using it when I moved to work for a software company.

It's still around.

Anybody out there using it? Is it any better than the free OSS equivalents?

EDIT: Forget I said anything. £300 for a product that's not been updated in 5 years. I think we can add that to the list of ex-products.

Shame really.

Council in UK's City of York outs hundreds of disabled residents with a single email blunder

Re: The Gift that just keeps on giving

Outlook now hide BCC by default. First you have to find the option hidden in the riband.

Microsoft remembers that taskbars used to move

Re: possible to "never combine" taskbar buttons

Yes,it's standard. The journalist is hallucinating.

AI layoffs backfire as cutting staff doesn't cut it, firms warned

Explains the new Register design

Was the new design done by an unmonitored Ai agent?

Ask.com, former home of search butler Jeeves, closes just as conversational search comes back

Is Dogpile the last of the early search?

Is it just Dogpile that's left of the minor search engines from the late 90s?

Moving to mainframe can be cheaper than sticking with VMware: Gartner

Good lunch?

The analyst must have been treated to a great lunch, a round of golf and a tickets to something nice.

Microsoft releases first big update after Nadella's vow to 'win back fans'

I'm in a similar position. Work on the server side doesn't need Windows any more. On the client side it's mostly browser based. Problem is Outlook, OneDrive & HyperV. That's a chunk to migrate away from.

Amazon chips no longer just a side dish, they're a $20B biz

But, but

Why aren't they using it in Amazon search? I'm still using ChatGPT for anything more than basic search of their products.

YouTuber has DIMM idea, builds working DRAM in backyard

Re: But does it run DOOM?

Anyone got any ideas on why someone would downvote this post?

England's school phone ban gets teeth, just in time to bite no one

Re: in my day, teachers regularly confiscated calculators, catapults and god knows what

My Glaswegian was married to a Hungarian so had a Hungarian surname.

This was in Wales in the 70s/80s.

Re: in my day, teachers regularly confiscated calculators, catapults and god knows what

My French teacher was Glaswegian - beat that!

Re: The House of Lords

You get far worse without democracy.

Re: The House of Lords

Like having a monarchy, it makes no sense at all.

However, it's worked very well for a long time so think carefully before changing it. Personally, I'm all for monarchy simply because it works better than a republic.

One of Europe's sovereign cloud picks may not be so-sovereign after all

Re: Running Your Own / Economies of Scale

In the 1990s, companies like your's were my customers.

They're all gone now. You can have BigCo or one man band support. Very little in the middle any more.

Database world trying to build natural language query systems again – this time with LLMs

Here we go again

Nearly 30 years ago, the software company I worked for integrated Dragon Dictate into their analytics product. You could phone the system and request something. Email then received of the results.

Disappeared without a trace.

5 years later, product called 'English SQL' (or something like that) let you type your question and it would be translated into SQL. Disappeared without a trace.

Neither of those was using gigawatts of power and they failed.

Microsoft raises UK Surface prices as RAM crisis reaches the checkout

Re: Bring back efficient programming

Good luck with that D-Sub monitor cable and weird mouse/keyboard connectors. 10 Base-T not so popular any more either.

Re: I wonder how many surface things they sell

Friend working at Downing Street had one. Nice and expensive, so popular in government if you need a windows machine.

Re: Making a Mac more attractive

Apple don't make their own RAM. they're not immune, just operating at higher margins so able so absorb this a little longer than the rest. Prices will go up soone enough.

Fewer than 3 in 10 register for HMRC's Making Tax Digital shake-up

Re: It's more work, more expense, marginal benefits at best

Accountants would much rather be helping their customers to be more efficient. This stuff is just a needless distraction from 'proper work'.

Re: MTD = Making tax difficult

SMEs are already paying tax 'on account', that just means they're paying in advance on the assumption they'll earn the same as last year.

I have friends working in Professional Indemnity insurance. That still works on a calendar year basis. Not great at year end but they're senior enough now to dump on others.

UK to spend £15M on AI-powered crime mapping in knife violence crackdown

Re: Hexagons?

They ran out of graph paper and only had the playing surface from their old D&D.

UK manufacturers under cyber fire with 80% reporting attacks

I was wondering the same. What happened to DMZ and restricted access? No need for everything to be exposed to everywhere.

Usage pricing leaving software vendors guessing what lands on the invoice

Re: IMHO, "Usage Pricing" is...

But it's all laid out clearly in that 1000 page licence document.

Chemists concoct nail polish that lets clawed humans use touch screens

Re: Solving a long-solved problem

Not so good for the front window demister

Google is to journalism what Vikings were to monks. Now their man will run the BBC

Re: Meanwhile

I watch an hour or 2 of streaming per day. When I had a TV licence, I watched 5 hours or so of 6 Nations rugby PER YEAR.

Value is in the quantity consumed, not the quantity unwanted.

Re: What's really sad is...

They had the scoop on the Cliff Richard being an abuser story.

Oh...