Posts by matjaggard

When Microsoft made the Windows as a Service pivot

I agree with what you said but you've missed the vital points - the free upgrade from Windows 7 and the inclusion of non-genuine versions as a valid upgrade path.

Whistleblower describes DOGE IT dept rampage at America's labor watchdog

Re: Incompetent vs Nefarious

Hanlon's Razor is one I normally live by but it has sadly been burnt on this particular fire.

Wallbleed vulnerability unearths secrets of China's Great Firewall 125 bytes at a time

I doubt it's that explicit or sinister, Hanlon's Razor is worth remembering.

The issue here is that none* of our MPs have the required technical understanding to properly scrutinise policy. I saw once a finance guy saying that everyone either has power or understanding of how to solve issues, never both. I think it's our popularity contest version of democracy plus the fact that we don't pay MPs enough to attract clever people (unless they're clever enough to know they can help a mate whilst an MP and get a lucrative job afterwards) that causes the issue.

*a guess, not fact checked.

What does it mean to build in security from the ground up?

Re: What it is, exactly, that’s unique about security as a system requirement?

I'd agree with most of that, security is hard.

The first sentence I'm not convinced by. Firstly because using a system in a way not intended is frequently not a security issue and is often very valuable. Secondly it's sometimes the requirements that cause the security issue.

China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

Re: Knowing your Rs from your elbow

That's why they asked similar questions such as how many s's in Mississippi

They've only gone and made Doom run in a PDF file

Re: Is there anywhere Doom has not been implemented?

I assumed it was how you could tell if a machine was Turing-complete.

As someone who's worked on PDF software I can confirm that PDFs have never been and will never be portable. By which I mean that the spec is so complex that no renderers stick to the format - most just copy what Acrobat does and ignore the spec where they vary.

Open source router firmware project OpenWrt ships its own entirely repairable hardware

Re: terribly nice but

I don't think AliExpress itself is an issue, the stores on there vary hugely but almost all of this type of hardware is made in China anyway.

The router you linked to is more expensive, has all ethernet ports at the slower speed (so to get almost equivalent you could buy a cheap gigabit hub) and as far as I can tell it's not FCC compliant, but it does have other great features like the 3 mPCIe interfaces. I think it's really designed for a slightly different use case.

Putin's pro-Trump trolls accuse Harris of poaching rhinos

Who are "they" and what are you talking about?

BBC weather glitch shows 13k mph winds in London, 404℃ in Nottingham

Re: Neptune is jealous

Miles per gallon will be obsolete before it is changed. I do find it frustrating when I can't configure systems to give me distances over a mile in miles but shorter distances in meters.

Campaigners claim 'Privacy Preserving Attribution' in Firefox does the opposite

The article already mentioned that this likely falls foul of GDPR so Europe is out too.

Admins using Windows Server Update Services up in arms as Microsoft deprecates feature

Re: MS seems to have lost it... big time

Everyone is talking with such favourable tone about WSUS but seems to be forgetting what a pain in the arse it was to use. I'm glad I've moved out of Microsoft systems management I feel slightly nauseous thinking back to attempting to patch a Windows server on an air gapped network. Linux made this stuff easy.

Re: Yay

Yes and you don't need to restart the server.

Datacenters bleed watts and cash – all because they're afraid to flip a switch

T series on AWS

Some cloud instances are expected to have worse performance or share more workloads per server. On AWS that's the burstable T series t3 for Intel, t3a for AMD and t4g for ARM. Surely these would be perfect for simple savings on power and cooling for Amazon? Maybe they've done it already.

The empire of C++ strikes back with Safe C++ blueprint

I'm not sure I'd agree with "a lot" because the hardest thing for me as a C-style language developer to learn was the borrowing of data and variables in Rust. I think you'll basically have to rewrite all the C++ code anyway to make it provably safe.

I'm happy if we have a new Safe C++ language to compete with Rust to keep them going in the right direction, but it's not going to be an order of magnitude easier to learn for a traditional C++ developer.

I don't quite get the connection between Rust and "bindings and excess dependencies" surely all languages need bindings - do you mean cross-language bindings because you use some other language elsewhere? Similarly, why would Rust mean excess dependencies - I think Crates that compile in and libraries that you link to are also equivalent to things you'd use in C and others?

Upgrading Linux with Rust looks like a new challenge. It's one of our oldest

Re: Loss of Full Control

You're wrong in your assumptions about loss of control and magic. That's not how Rust works. You are in full control, there's no magic* but you are limited to only doing things that are provably safe.

*Actually all languages have magic. C will magically handle passing arguments to functions using registers and putting things on the stack where needed. Library functions are magic until you read the code but mostly we don't, we rely on a human description.

Re: Why a new language?

But Rust has proven that a Systems Programming Language as you call it can and should have safety features - they just can't be implemented at runtime if you need performance. That is why a completely new language was required, you can't add compile time checks for memory safety for C code because as soon as you call a method, especially one that passes data between threads you can't prove who owns the data and has the right to free it for example. That set of concepts is what people find hard to learn about Rust and that is exactly what's required for provably safe code.

MongoDB takes a swing at PostgreSQL after claiming wins against rival

Unconvinced

I'm really not sure Mongo is as popular as they think it is. Having used both MongoDB and relational database for years the problems of each system are many and varied.

For us it took ages to get user friendly results from Mongo due to the eventually-consistent nature of the default config but in return our production downtime was zero for several years whereas the relational database needed a proxy in front to handle updates without downtime and mistakes happened. But generally I feel that most data works well being saved in an atomic commit across tables.

Techie told 'Bill Gates' Excel is rubbish – and the Microsoft boss had it fixed in 48 hours

Re: i8088

If AMD had not been around then someone else would have got there but not until Intel made masses of cash. There wouldn't have been enough incentive for Intel to compete and so they would have become complacent and someone else (potentially even ARM) would have beaten them by the late 90s I think.

Incidentally, can someone ensure this happens to nVidia sometime soon please?

Users call on Microsoft to update Outlook's friendly name feature

Grammar

I noticed that you put [sic] after the pluralised form of the company name "Microsoft are ..." - I don't understand this, surely a company is made up of many people who are collectively making a decision. I don't think it's a good idea to see a company as a single non-human entity which is implied if you write "Microsoft is ...".

DARPA suggests turning old C code automatically into Rust – using AI, of course

Re: The software industry keeps digging its own grave

I don't understand why all the commentards are so against this concept. Human + AI make a pretty good combination for some tasks and I don't see why this wouldn't be one of those tasks. AI can likely translate 90% of the code to safe Rust, humans can review places where it fails or where it outputs unsafe code (the advantage of Rust being that unsafe code is labelled as such). This is an easier task for AI than static code analysis because where the AI fails in code analysis there's nothing to indicate to the human where the failure might be.

CrowdStrike meets Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong will

Re: Canary Deployment

Actually Crowdstrike does have exactly this type of system - customers tend to opt for earlier releases using test systems. However CS allow some updates to skip that process and this was one of those. Many customers only found out about this skipping when their systems crashed.

Oracle's Java pricing brews bitter taste, subscribers spill over to OpenJDK

Re: Defies belief

They couldn't come up with the "wrong" conclusion due to who this report was funded by.

I'm not saying Oracle have done anything right ever, but this report is just propaganda funded by Azul.

Microsoft 365 remains 'degraded' as Azure outage resolved

Honestly, who do you think reads The Register? We know what a cloud is!

Bake an LLM with custom prompts into your app? Sure! Here's how to get started

Re: Another tip for integrating LLMs into your project

But experimentation (or "stuffing an LLM shaped peg into any hole you can find) is how most innovation happens. I personally love it currently.

A really good example is Pulumi AI - makes learning this excellent alternative to Terraform much easier.

Another is energy supplier Octopus who are using LLM to gather information and write emails which are then edited or checked by humans before being sent out to customers.

Google finally addresses those bizarre AI search results

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

Can we really call the base of a pizza a "pie"?

Amazon's latest 'flex' VMs promise savings for your burstiest apps

Factual inaccuracy

The instances actually start at 8GB RAM and have a 4:1 ratio of memory GB to vCPUs.

Re: T instances

Yes, I'm not sure why The Register didn't comment on that. They're similar but not the same - for example no burst pricing it seems. The question in my mind remains "why didn't they just make this T5i or similar?"

VMware giving away Workstation Pro, Fusion Pro free for personal use

Re: Great chance to get some free experience

I'm not sure it's very valuable. Anything you do with these can never be used for making money. I'm not sure about other people but even on personal projects I'm always aware that my work could be valuable but if I started on one of these products I never can. Even a document I create inside a VM could never be used for business purposes presumably.

Hey, Reddit. Quick question. All those clicks on my ads. Were they actually real?

Re: The good clickAI

In the short and medium term, clicking blindly on all ads will just give money from mostly smaller companies to Google and Facebook.

I do commit ad fraud constantly, assuming the description in the article is correct - I click on adverts for companies I dislike (mostly temu currently) and on some adverts in apps that I do like. I never buy stuff from ads though - with the exception of Google Shopping which is frustratingly helpful.

SpiNNcloud Systems unveils Arm-based 'neuromorphic supercomputer'

That's slow

I was working on this as an undergraduate at the University of Manchester in 2006. It's surprising that the technology hasn't developed faster - I thought it was an excellent idea at the time.

Prof asks court to protect his Unfollow Everything 2.0 extension from Facebook's ire

Re: No need to make it better...

I recommend the BBC podcast on the subject called "The Gatekeepers"

Elon Musk's latest brainfart is to turn Tesla cars into AWS on wheels

I was always confused by the F@H client as to why it insisted on keeping the workload ready to go when I wanted to use the computer.

Presumably Elon would automate completely shutting down the workload when you switch the car on and loading it or a new workload when you switch it off again? It's easier to tell when the compute is needed for the main purpose in a car than it is on a PC, or especially on a server.

Forget the AI doom and hype, let's make computers useful

Re: AI and AGI are too high levels abstractions

I disagree. Today's AI systems are very significantly better than humans at some tasks and completely unable to do the basics at others - to me that proves that AI will always be different but it's wrong to describe it as "stupid" just because it can't do something we can.

Post Office slapped down for late disclosure of documents in Horizon scandal inquiry

Re: MPs on a jury duty style system

This is so unfair. They're mostly people who genuinely want to help improve the country. Sadly they're not the best people for the job because we pay so much more for private sector leaders. Maybe some small minority are also in it for the power or revolving door opportunities rather than to genuinely help.

If we give them zero respect, threats of violence and a not-much-above-average wage then who the heck are we expecting to apply??!

How a single buck bought bragging rights in the battle to port Windows 95 to NT

Re: Windoze NEVER worked well.

I'm no Apple fanboi but I do have to use one for work. I find Apple exactly as intuitive as Windows once you're used to them, both take time to get used to how they do things.

On other things, MacOS has a faster filesystem than NTFS in my experience but a tendancy for things to "just not work" like missing keyboard control or external hardware not made by Apple just stopping working where it would be fine on Windows.

Exposed: Chinese smartphone farms that run thousands of barebones mobes to do crime

If I was creating a mechanism for detecting a phone being a real one, I would rely on things that are not easily faked like enough entropy in the tilt sensor readings.

Network Rail steps back from geofencing over safety fears

Re: AI solution?

Ooh that's annoyed me, well done.

For what it's worth I'm going to rise to the bait.

Not all these technologies are all hype and no substance. Blockchain always had pretty limited use cases in my opinion. AI on the other hand is going to be pretty transformative to the world - equivalent to the industrial revolution or the internet. People will get crazy rich from it and very many, possibly most current jobs will just stop and we'll almost all have to change how we work to augment the AI rather than instead of it.

Re: because...

> there's always some means of defeating it if determined enough

Well yes but you actually don't need to make it really hard to circumvent a protection, just harder than the alternatives.

Lenovo to offer certified refurbished PCs and servers

Re: Fresh new SPYOS...err... BIOS, as well.

Why? Because they forgot to make the BIOS spyey enough first time they sold it??

Re: Excuse me if I'm a bit suspicious

But if you trust them for a new computer where they can embed whatever they want in the bios or whatever (and many do), why wouldn't you trust them for the refurbished option?

City council megaproject to spend millions for manual work Oracle system was meant to do

Re: Priceless ..

Depends on your budget though.

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

I'm not sure you've understood how this works!

From the spec: "Web Monetization doesn’t allow a website to specify a payment amount or currency. It only allows the site to tell the browser it can accept payments.

"With the help of a WM provider , your visitor decides whether to make a payment, how much and how often to pay, and in which currency."

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

Re: You're paid to code, dammit, so get writing!

I've had to fight the system occasionally to remove unused code. My worst was with a bank where every code change required a change request from an internal or external customer. Thankfully I found a helpful business analyst to sign off on "as a developer I want less pointless code so I can focus on the important stuff" type stories.

Mozilla CEO quits, pushes pivot to data privacy champion... but what about Firefox?

Agreed. I also feel it's a shame that everything will be WebKit/Blink based in the near future. It puts a lot of power into the hands of those who moderate those browser engines.

IPv4 address rentals to mint millions of dollars for AWS

Re: Charging a fee is a reasonable thing

Incorrect. They should only charge a fee if there is an alternative. Specifically they do not offer load balancers as IPv6 only. You can get Dual Stack or IPv4 only but if you want a load balancer you must pay for an address. That's a simple increase in price, not a new charge for an avoidable commodity.

GitOps pioneer Weaveworks unravels after funding fabric frays

Re: 5 year rule

Like Amazon?

KDE 6 misses boat to make it into Kubuntu 24.04

If you were going to finish that with "desktop" then don't bother because desktop sales are on their way down.

If "laptop" then the year of the Linux desktop was around 2011 with the Chromebook.

If "computer" then it was probably 2008 with Android.

Return-to-office mandates boost company profits? Nope

Re: if you, as a "middle manager"

Sadly the umbrella is required in my experience. The crap will fall, no matter what. From shareholders, from customers, from suppliers, from government, from lawyers, from the need to make really significant decisions occasionally, from unions. We need people higher up to deal with all the big crap and pass it down as smaller crap that can eventually be dealt with by people who also need to get some proper work done.

Ideally those layers are not too high and the people are both clever and understanding, as well as trusting their employees, to enable the maximum work to be done but sadly that's rarely the case.