Posts by Doctor Syntax

EU broadcasters say smart TVs and voice assistants are the next gatekeepers

Re: Unplugged from the Internet: Not a Workable Option for Many New TVs

"Your Internet connection is not working properly"

Oh, yes it is.

It might be worthwhile spending the extra money on a plain monitor and a Pi running OSMC, TVHeadEnd, MythTV or the like.

Microslop stuffs AI photo restyling powers into OneDrive

It looks like the memo "We are reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points" hasn't arrived yet. Or is it a case of taking a long time to turn a super-tanker?

Country that put backdoors into Cisco routers to spy on world bans foreign routers

I'm sure it won't be too difficult to set up a small factory to insert imported boards into imported cases and put them into locally made packaging.

Windows boss promises to heal the operating system's self-inflicted wounds

Re: Trapped.

I'm not sure about this. Where data sovereignty becomes a concern US software and services are being looked at askance. If big user categories - governments, for instance, take the view that stuff has to be run on non-MS platforms then this is going to rsult in

a) It's not longer what people have to use

b) It's not a preferred platform to drive expensive equipment. Existing users will be stuck with it but many of them will already be stuck with unsupported versions of Windows.

c) Application vendors will be presented with a changing market to which they will need to adapt or lose to competitors who do.

d) People are discovering there are options.

The days of sticking it to the user base may be on the way out.

Despite my long established position of preferring Linux and anything FOSS to Microsoft and anything propitiatory I think it's possible the message may really have got through. I thought the fact that Suleyman was moved a few weeks ago might have been significant, that he was the one behind the push of Copilot into everything and that being promoted to look for "superintelligence he was being moved somewhere where he couldn't do any more damage but they'd just not told him.

They can't be unaware of the digital sovereignty trend that's appearing outside of the US and that it will be a push towards FOSS. They may also realise that home users are increasingly being set up with one or other FOSS office suites on their new Windows laptops. The increase in H/W prices - ironically driven by the AI they've been so keen on - is going to dampen the replacements that the W11 games were supposed to have stimulated and that may lead to existing PCs being refreshed with Linux installs. All of a sudden the market's belief that nobody got fired for buying Microsoft is looking a bit frail.

CERN eggheads burn AI into silicon to stem data deluge

Re: Science needs better funding and higher policy urgency

It's just an A/C who doesn't even know that building the experiment is part of doing the experiment.

Re: Science needs better funding and higher policy urgency

The folks at CERN are pretty good at finding things. Some folk on the Register seem unable even to find the Wikipedia article on the High Luminosity Collider. It's not surprising, then, that they post A/C

Re: Science needs better funding and higher policy urgency

What are you on about? This is a project which has been funded and underway for some time. But as an upgrade to the LHC it means that equipment has to be removed from the LHC and new equipment installed. This isn't the first time there's been a long shutdown for an upgrade. It's not planning delays, it's huge, complex instrumentation being built on-site in place of the previous generation of equiptemtnw hich has to be removed so it can't be kept running in the interim.

A better way of looking at it is that this is a massive framework built nearly 40 years ago which keeps getting repurposed to carry out new eperiments to keep it at the forefront of science These repurposings are seriously non-trivial. If it were a DC rack you'd not be surprised to find that occasionally the old boxes were taken out and new ones put in and that the replacement takes as long as it needs- the difference here is that the replacement takes a few years.

Elon Musk wants to build 50 times more chips than the world currently produces, using 'new physics'

Re: New Physics

I think the explanation's simpler than that. The old physics won't deliver so he needs new physics. It will also finally enable the fully self-driving car.

Re: So....

The Register commentator seldom does.

Re: So....

I'm not sure his investors are normal people.

Re: A Terawatt of compute.. In Space.

" It doesn't do to keep all your eggs in one basket."

It does if you accept that that's the only basket you're going to get and you'd better look after it.

Re: Peak Musk...

"He was quite particular about the distinction between Iain Banks and Iain M Banks"

No, if Musk says it was Iain Banks then Iain Banks it must have been. Just ask Grok.

Who needs helium when you have new physics?

Smooth criminals talking their way into cloud environments, Google says

I wonder how vulnerable chatbot hell-desk substitutes might be.

The drone swarm is coming, and NATO air defenses are too expensive to cope

Re: This report is bizarre

The way things are going if you today have a stock of 100 000 cheap and efficient combat drones, in five months you will have used them all.

Re: 'Be scared' sells newspapers

"The orange muppet didnt inform anyone in advance."

Of course he did. He may not have made any courtesy calls. He certainly didn't try to build an alliance. But the build-up was itself informative.

"The takeaway from Iran's tactics is that adversaries are likely to combine precision weapons with cheap, mass-produced drones to overwhelm air defense (sic) systems so that the precision weapons can get through"

Aren't there people whose job it is to work out stuff like this in advance instead of waiting to discover it from experience?

NASA sets 'impossible' ground rules for relocation of 'flown space vehicle'

Time is the critical factor here. Turning a draft RFP into a real one takes time. The proposals have to be evaluated. Questions have to be asked of them. Questions need to be answered. At some point it becomes too late to award a contract before Trump's out, hopefully replaced by someone in possession of some marbles - maybe even a full set.

Re: Isn't This The Point?

"I don't think that a vast cost to move the shuttle intact will be any deterrent"

All that has to be done is drag out the planning until he's gone.

Re: USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) ?

Water would have been better. It could have got a lot of skips.

"Well, that Twat survived COVID"

Most people did but his followers might have had less chance than others.

"My law authorizing and funding the Space Shuttle Discovery's movement to Houston is being set into motion thanks to NASA's announcement, and I applaud Administrator Isaacman for keeping this process moving."

His law? I thought it was the US's law but it's generous of him to take responsibility. In the meantime, if he believes all that I suppose there's a queue of people with bridges to sell him.

And isn't this turning out to be a particularly good Register Monday morning?

Palantir trial plugs into UK financial watchdog's data trove

"Whitehall simultaneously insists it wants to wean itself off exactly this kind of dependency"

The longest journey starts with the first step. When are they going to take it?

SpaceX hits back at Amazon in orbital datacenter dispute

It would be only fair that the FCC should treat both objections equally. Uphold them both.

CMA dithers on cloud probe as Microsoft's meter runs on taxpayer dime

Re: "AI investment is central to the UK's growth strategy"

And that even leaves out the question of whether the investment - even if real - would be a good idea. Best to divert the money to growing the real economy while we still have one.

Microsoft fixes broken Windows update days after vowing fewer broken updates

Not just the ISP. The router doesn't work too well when the power goes off.

RSAC 2026: Uncle Sam backs out, and AI agents are everywhere

Foreign attendees might be lacking as well.

Microsoft: Removing some Copilots will improve Windows 11

Re: Fundamentals?

"Or (whisper it) have they perhaps been letting AI 'write' their code?"

Whisper? "Brag" might be the word you're looking for, given that they don't know any better.

Re: The internal polling numbers must be brutal

Don't you think ESU is just getting people ready for a subscription model for W12 what you'll have to use whether you want to or not if you're not prepared to make the jump to something better?

Re: No mention of forced cloud logins

"He didn't say how many people care deeply about Windows."

That was just boilerplate pasted in from the PR phrasebook. Don't read anything into it, it's not supposed to mean anything.

Re: I have an idea

No!!!!!

Extinguish would be on the way.

Re: I have an idea

Why 7 & not W2K?

It looks like promoting Suleyman to chase "superintelligence" (whatever that might be) really was moving him sideways to where he couldn't cause any more damage.

Junior disobeyed orders and tried untested feature during a live robot demo

Re: Well armed robot

"Hopefully nobody did a rapid shutdown of a robot armed with a .50 calibre machine gun"

or, at least nobody did who lived to tell the tale.

Re: Well armed robot

Same company, same junior, same semi humanoid robot?

Re: Am I the only one who...

"they would have had it plugged in the whole time"

Charging might be external only with no option to plug it in.

Re: Documentation

Or, all too often, product.

Re: Makes sense

Ohm y.

Re: The junior kept his job.

Keeping his job might have depended on other factors. He might have been the one with some key skills in other respects - just not in running demos. Alternatively one of the key investor's sons.

Re: Short cuts make long delays, but at least nothing shorted out

At least he didn't have to write up the test.

When it comes to catastrophic space weather, the UK is holding a cocktail umbrella

What countries are well prepared and what form do the preparations take? Is there anything better than a cocktail umbrella?

Re: Tinfoil hats for everyone

In the event of an event that tinfoil hat is going to set your head on fire.

Russians are posing as Signal support to launch phishing attacks

Bravo!

"Who Are We, and Why Do We Have Your Information?"

Professional spammers for banks and because there's no GDPR in the US your bank doesn't have to give a shit. And neither do we because we're only paying for a month's monitoring despite the fact we didn't secure it.

Calling out corporate BS? There's a steaming pile to aim for

I don't know about Nobel prizes but something that makes you laugh and then makes you think qualifies i for an ig-Nobel.

Starmer's digital ID reboot raises same old questions as its Blair-era ancestor

Re: "if any other party gets into power."

Could you flesh out the arguments here? If you're blaming him for holding the referendum you have to bear in mind that (a) he was a remainer and (b) it was a compromise forced on hum by the nutjob wing of the party. If that's the case you should apply that to the nutjob wing. There are certainly objections to his behaviour but I wonder if you've properly worked those out. They're not obvious in your rather abrupt comment.

Payment biz pulls plug on open source charity after KYC spat

"You think they have anyone smart enough to work that out?"

In view of some of the other comments below maybe this is one where we don't attribute it to incompetence.

Yes, sorry. I should have spotted it earlier. I think we were ll too busy looking at how the spat developed rather than why.