Posts by Throatwarbler Mangrove

America’s consumer watchdog drops leash on proposed data broker crackdown

To channel yet another commentard . . .

Winning so hard!

Annual electronic waste footprint per person is 11.2 kg

Re: Software longevity

Google has moved to an 8-year support cycle for their Pixel series (up from 3), so kudos to them. My last Synology router continued to get updates for several years, until it overheated and died (in fairness to the router, the reason it overheated was that it had become a favorite resting spot for the cat). Both brands get my sustainability seal of approval.

On the flip side, Dell used to make durable laptops with swappable batteries. I finally retired a gen 2 i5 Inspiron which I'd been using as a lightweight server (running Linux, natch) because a friend gifted me a beast of a machine as a replacement. My more recent Dell laptops (work-issued) have all sucked. My current Precision manages to be not all that fast, despite nominally being a "workstation" grade laptop, yet the battery life is well south of 2 hours under sustained use, and the battery is sealed in, so I can't swap it on demand. The Latitude that I traded for it was of shoddy construction and had a terrible screen, as well as a sealed-in battery. What happened, Dell?

And don't even get me started on Bluetooth earbuds . . .

Boffins warn that AI paper mills are swamping science with garbage studies

What a sad life you must have that this is the sort of thing you feel like you need to "contribute." There are other posters on this site with whom I disagree but who at least make an effort to formulate a rational argument. You aren't even a good troll, you're just boring.

Amazon tested warehouse robots and found they're not ready to replace humans

Perhaps Amazon workers . . .

. . . should start wearing wooden shoes while working alongside these robots. They might also play The Beastie Boys for inspiration.

‘Infuriated’, ‘disappointed' ... Ex-VMware customers explain why they migrated to Nutanix

Re: How long...

Nutanix does not currently have the market share to make that approach viable. Broadcom's takeover of VMware is creating fragmentation in the virtualization marketplace, and, while Nutanix is definitely benefiting, so are a host of other players, as mentioned in the article.

Nip chip smugglers by building trackers into GPUs, US Senator suggests

On brand

One of the stupidest senators from the stupidest party representing one of the stupidest states makes a breathtakingly stupid suggestion.

Shocking.

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

Amazing ..

... something coming out of this administration I can get behind. Honestly, I'm in favor of a President shaking up the way government functions and trying to decalcify the bureaucracy. It's just a shame this one comes with a side order of culture war and anti-science bullshit.

Feeling dumb? Let Google's latest AI invention simplify that wordy writing for you

Re: Oh, lighten up

"Dark humor is like food: not everybody gets it."

J. Stalin

Re: Feeling ignorant?

It's also the preferred language of a race of the First Ones. Brandon won't feel so clever when he's been abducted by godlike aliens and subjected to unspeakable, mysterious "experiments."

Fire bad

FIRE BAD!

Pentagon declares war on 'outdated' software buying, opens fire on open source

Came in to say this. Let's see who gets the contract to "rationalize" DoD procurement.

Soviet probe from 1972 set to return to Earth ... in May 2025

Re: Message from Venera-8 descent module

If it breaks in two and manages to hit both, I will really have to reconsider this atheism thing.

Re: If it lands on Trump...

Ah, I see you are also a man of Culture (Club).

Ex-NSA cyber-boss: AI will soon be a great exploit coder

That's nothing

Turn the tables on the AI and force a warp core breach.

The State of Open Source in 2025? Honestly, it's a mess but you knew that already

Re: Motivations

The consumers like "free beer," "free speech" is not so important.

Swiss boffins admit to secretly posting AI-penned posts to Reddit in the name of science

Re: “…the risks (e.g. trauma etc.) are minimal.”

"owning a penis"

Is it detachable?

In any case, I find that owning a penis can be too much responsibility, risk, and expense, so I prefer to rent or lease instead. And definitely never buy new; those things lose an incredible amount of value once you drive them off the lot.

Also, they're a bitch to insure.

Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline

To channel a certain class of reader ...

I don't even live on the Iberian Peninsula, and I don't know anyone who does, so why is The Register reporting on this event? Why tell me something that's not relevant to ME?

Tesla's Optimus can't roll without rare earth magnets, and Beijing ain't budging yet

With Tesla . . .

I envision something like this.

NTT creates a drone that triggers and catches lightning – then keeps flying

Re: Bolt from Heaven

"They know what they did."

--God

SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule docks to the International Space Station

Re: 1,262 tortillas

No wonder NASA was keeping mum about the other cargo; they didn't want to say anything about the gallons of tequila being sent up to the station.

Re: 1,262 tortillas

Ackshually...the hard tortillas are for shitty gringo hard tacos, usually filled with unseasoned hamburger meat. Soft tortillas are the real thing.

Re: Musk Bad

Username checks out.

IBM orders US sales to locate near customers or offices

WOKE NONSENSE!

Whenever there's an article on DEI (or, in many cases, pretty much anything) someone is required to thunder a comment about "WOKE NONSENSE!”, so I figured it may as well be me this time. (The ALL CAPS is, of course, mandatory.)

Since this comment board is text-only, you'll just have to imagine my portly, bewhiskered jowls quivering in outrage at the very thought.

Microsoft hits Ctrl-Z after Teams trips over file sharing

Re: I never get tired of saying it

In defense of the cloud, it has enabled some very powerful capabilities which would be much more difficult to implement without it. I got an IM in Teams from a teammate in India requesting a file, which popped up on my phone. From my phone, I was able to locate the file in OneDrive and send it to him via Teams. I'm not saying you couldn't implement something similar with on-prem technology, but the cloud does make it simpler for the customer, freeing them from having to administer the complicated back-end infrastructure. For smaller organizations, cloud technologies can enable capabilities that they simply wouldn't have otherwise.

It obviously has its downsides as well, such as operational cost and being at the mercy of the vendor's changes, so it's not all bread and roses, to be sure.

Pentagon needs China's rare earths, Beijing just put them behind a permit wall. Oops

Mr. President, we can't allow . . .

. . . a mineshaft gap!

4chan, the 'internet’s litter box,' appears to have been pillaged by rival forum

Re: I would never let my cat go anywhere near 4chan

Especially not on Caturday.

Unfair to litter boxes

I don't know about you, but I scoop my cat's litter box daily and discard the contents rather than spreading them around and displaying them proudly. Also, I would never let my cat go anywhere near 4chan. He'd probably wind up as the subject of kitty porn.

Static electricity can be shockingly funny, but the joke's over when a rack goes dark

APC UPS

Well, there's your problem. While Armenian Potato Clocks do contain the densest, freshest tubers, they seem to have a lamentable inability to hold a charge for very long.

Microsoft total recalls Recall totally to Copilot+ PCs

Awesome!

My home-built PC without an AI-ready CPU is looking even better!

The most important experimental distro you've never heard of gets new project lead

Re: Pathetic

Well, now I want to use Gobo Linux that much more because of the people it will piss off, in essence "because fuck you." It sparks joy.

Re: Pathetic

"Sometimes the Old Farts really do know best."

That's true when it comes to things that are tried and tested, but it's utterly worthless when trying to do something innovative. To quote Arthur C. Clarke: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

In any case, even if you're right, why get enraged? What harm is being threatened by someone else's experiments? Isn't experimentation a cornerstone of learning?

Pathetic

"The changes Gobo makes enrage Unix traditionalists"

Imagine being so attached to a traditional way of implementing an operating system that someone else experimenting with alternatives enrages you. It's ironic that there's a faction of so-called technologists who are so hidebound, close-minded, and conservative that they can't bear the thought of someone else doing a different thing.

It sounds like there's increased disk usage but that it decreases complexity, since every installed program presumably includes everything it needs to run rather than depending on a patchwork of dependencies. As you say, that means disk usage could get quite high, but storage is at much less of a premium than it once was, and I can envision having a filesystem with built-in deduplication to help manage overall capacity and/or enhancing the versioning capability so that only changes to a given program get deployed.

Re: But.....can you use it for real work????

"why tell me about something I cannot use?"

Because it's interesting to explore alternative ways of doing things? Because El Reg is written for an audience comprised of people who are not just you?

What a limited perspective on the world you have.

OpenAI slams 'sham' takeover bid by wannabe 'AGI dictator' Musk in countersuit

Ugh

I don't love either party here, but the last thing the world needs is Musk in control of OpenAI as well as TwitterAI. Better to keep his influence minimized at this point.

Meta's AI, built on ill-gotten content, can probably build a digital you

Re: If this LLM can truly indistinguishably mimic you

How hard can it be to post anonymous, superficial one-liners to an Internet forum? Your days are numbered, AC.

Nvidia paid $1M for Mar-a-Lago meal, US later scrapped AI chip export crackdown

"One senile patriarch of a corrupt family"

But enough about Trump ...

Remember

Remember when Trump's followers were talking about "The Big Guy" in the White House wanting his cut?

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Trump kills clearances for infosec's SentinelOne, ex-CISA boss Chris Krebs

No relation

Infosec guru Brian Krebs, who is no relation to Chris, reports getting hundreds of angry, hateful emails directed his way due to mistaken identity. He said he can only imagine what Chris is getting. Brian has also been reporting on the many security failures of the Trump administration, yielding the inevitable complaints about being "political." He has correctly pointed out the overlap between national security and politics in response.

In any case, Brian's experience really highlights that there's a vocal contingent of Trump's followers who are just like him: mean, spiteful, and mind-numbingly stupid.

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

Onion bhajis . . . in . . . SPACE!

Tech hiring stalls as AI hype, layoffs, tariffs, economic uncertainty, more collide

Like the products from Despair.com: "Made in the USA. By Robots."

AI entrepreneur sent avatar to argue in court – and the judge shut it down fast

This is certainly a novel use of AI, and the situation is interesting. If reporters didn't cover the actions of dodgy individuals trying to put on over on society, there would be a lot less news.

Boeing 787 radio software safety fix didn't work, says Qatar

Sounds like Boeing has really gone . . .

. . . into the Qatar.

Scattered Spider stops the Rickrolls, starts the RAT race

Re: Spectre

Before I kill you, Mr. Bond...

System builders say server prices set to spike as Trump plays customs cowboy

Re: Team American fsck yeah

"pimp prices"

Oh no! Does that mean tariffs are being applied to Russian mail-order brides as well? MAGA-land won't be happy about that!

Intel's latest CEO Lip Bu Tan: 'You deserve better'

Is he really trying to make Intel better?

Or are Intel investors and customers just getting ...

*Puts on sunglasses*

Lip service?

Microsoft is redesigning the Windows BSoD to get you back to work ‘as fast as possible’

It's quite clever, really

An underappreciated quality of Microsoft marketing is the continuous flow of superficial and essentially irrelevant changes which allows them to stay front and center in the tech press. This sort of anodyne change allows Microsoft to receive free publicity without needing to engage in an expensive marketing campaign. My hat is reluctantly off to them for employing this strategy.

When even Microsoft can’t understand its own Outlook, big tech is stuck in a swamp of its own making

Re: Stop Talking to Each Other...

General mobile ad blockers are available. I run Blokada v5, which I find to be highly effective at blocking app-based advertising. The first time an app popped up a full-screen video ad, I became highly motivated to find a solution.

UK govt data people not 'technical,' says ex-Downing St data science head

Re: "UK govt data people not 'technical'"? Really?

Ah, I see you are also a man of culture.