Posts by Gaius

European AI flag bearer Mistral's new open weights model is 'Le Chonk'

Not really sovereign…

… if it needs American GPUs to train it. Where is the European hardware?

Ruby Central in 'real financial jeopardy' following RubyGems maintainer ruckus

Chef is also based on Ruby, but that is legacy too having firmly lost to Ansible in its space,

Future of UK's multibillion Ajax armored vehicle program looks shaky

Re: old boy network rides again

I think you are missing the point. If you took CV90 or Boxer or Lynx or Borsuk or any similar vehicle and added an extra 15 tons of weight, they would not work either.

Brit space sector struggles to compete with £90K graduate banking salaries

All these rocket scientists and they can’t figure out this puzzle! (Hint: the average salary for an aerospace engineer in the US is six figures)

US Navy backs right to repair after $13B carrier crew left half-fed by contractor-locked ovens

Moves and should move - salute it

Mr Intel leaving Intel is not a great sign... for Intel

> we'd all be using nitrogen-cooled 9Ghz single core 32-bit CPUs with unholy memory extension hacks. Forget smartphones, those wouldn't even exist

That sounds pretty good actually, where do I sign?

For the record: You just ordered me to cause a very expensive outage

Re: Sometimes, when the stars & planets align just right ...

And then everyone clapped

The X Window System is still hanging on at 40

Motif is the pinnacle of GUI design

That is all.

Microsoft's Recall should be celebrated as the savior of SMEs and scourge of CEOs

Power Platform

MS Power Platform already has tools for this, no AI necessary, it simply tracks email flows, files shared and forwarded etc and diagrams your processes from that. Did I mention, no AI necessary?

EU grants €15M funding for ICARUS inflatable heat shield

“Inflatable heat shield”

They must take us for absolute mugs

Raspberry Pi IPO is oversubscribed multiple times

Re: Oversubscribed

Nope. I’m an enthusiast and want a few shares just to have them! I expect there are loads of people like that.

Energy buffs give small modular reactors a gigantic reality check

On the contrary the UK knows a great deal about small, very reliable nuclear reactors. We use them on submarines and have done for decades.

Codd almighty! Has it been half a century of SQL already?

Squeal

Re: SQL As Turing Complete Language

PL/SQL has compiled to native code for quite some time now, it is pretty fast. We used to use EXTPROCs written in C but no need for that anymore.

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

But what are the downsides?

Intel adds fresh x86 and vector instructions for future chips

nobody wants to compile architecture-specific code to utilise the new functionality

No-one needs to do that. As long as the maths libs on your system are up to date, any existing code that links against them will pick up routines that are compiled for it.

Linux kernel edges closer to dropping ReiserFS

Re: Puzzled

> At the time, XFS was immature

At the time the Linux XFS implementation was immature yes, but the original XFS was (and is) rock solid

Google Cloud started running its servers for an extra year, still loses billions

Ironically the option of skipping a year or two to save money isn't available to cloud customers - stop paying even for a month and you will be switched off. This tactic is only available to those who stayed with on-prem.

‘Staggering’ cost of vintage Sun workstations sees OpenSolaris-fork Illumos drop SPARC support

I never thought I’d see the day

Perl changes dev's permaban for 'unacceptable' behaviour to a year-long lockout after community response

Re: Very.Big.Sigh

There is none of this constant infighting and factionalism in the FORTRAN community. I don’t know about COBOL but I suspect not there either.

Website maker Wix embarks on weird WordPress-trashing campaign, sends 'influencer' users headphones from 'WP'

Re: Sigh...

During the pandemic one of the local businesses that we support has gone online and unfortunately chosen Wix, the amount of user-hostile JS they cram into their site is incredible. And they have written it in such a way that blocking tracking renders the site non-functional. In other words they know perfectly well that what they are doing is wrong.

I'm not going to boycott a small business over making a bad technical choice, but I do only access their site in a separate browser process!

Mimecast bins SolarWinds and compromised servers alike in wake of supply chain hack

Cisco's ESA product is in direct competition with Mimecast, so this is a curious choice. Having said that Cisco Stealthwatch is a decent product, if that's what they mean by Netflow.

Ex-asylum seeker with infosec degree loses discrimination claim against UK cyber range provider after storming out

Re: Hanging my head in shame

It’s a room set up so a red team (hackers) and a blue team (sysadmins) can directly compete in real time with their activities displayed for observers to critique, hence the big screens on the wall referenced in the article. The name is meant to evoke a firing range.

Man arrested after UK school finds wiped hard drives on devices connected to network

Re: Back in my day

> They just used to nick the balls out of the mice

I remember, then you would need to boil an egg to get a new one. Good times.

Angry 123-Reg customers in the UK wake up to another day where hosted mail doesn't get through to users on Microsoft email accounts

It definitely did start on Friday, not Saturday, a full day before they acknowledged it

No, Kubernetes doesn’t make applications portable, say analysts. Good luck avoiding lock-in, too

Was this not obvious to everyone from the start? How did you think any provider would commoditise their service and still make money?

As Amazon pulls union-buster job ads, workers describe a 'Mad Max' atmosphere – unsafe, bullying, abusive

If I remember correctly it was Jack Welch at GE who popularised it it, sacking the bottom 10% every year.

Nokia 5310: Retro feature phone shamelessly panders to nostalgia, but is charming enough to be forgiven

The problem is...

... that this is not a featurephone. It's an Android phone merely pretending to be one. So you have all the privacy and security problems of Android and none of the upside.

What the punters really want is the old Nokias, with modern batteries and ability to connect to modern 3 and 4G networks, and that's it. No apps, no telemetry, nothing else.

From 'Queen of the Skies' to Queen of the Scrapheap: British Airways chops 747 fleet as folk stay at home

It's crazy to think how long the 747 has been in service, especially when compared to the A380.

Brit retailer John Lewis to catapult 111 tech bods over to Capgemini weeks after dumping 244 on Wipro

Re: Howdy Partner

... and that’s why the quality of their own-brand products has taken a nosedive.

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.johnlewis.com

The old John Lewis is long gone, I'm sorry to say

Bad news: So much of your personal data has been hacked that lesson manuals on how to use it are the latest hot property

Re: So, basically businesses should acquire fraud guides

This is a guide on how to exploit information that has already been negligently mishandled by various companies, not one that will assist in preventing such negligence in one's own company.

Thought you'd go online to buy better laptop for home working? Too bad, UK. So did everyone. Laptops, monitors and WLANs fly off shelves

the pressure and temperature circumstances would be the same for both

The cargo hold is pressurised but not heated

UK Defence Committee probe into national security threat of Huawei sure to uncover lots of new and original insights

the usual crop of bad practices and sloppy coding

Any competently written backdoor is indistinguishable from a bug.

But you’re right, it’s not as if we even have the option of making it ourselves any more. It’s Huawei or the highway.

GlaxoSmithKline ditches IR35 contractors: Go PAYE or go home

Sometimes internal people just don't have the skill-set (and the company may not need that design skill in future - much)

Cost of a contractor vs cost of a training course and having those skills on tap if they are ever needed again. Should be simple maths.

One man's mistake, missing backups and complete reboot: The tale of Europe's Galileo satellites going dark

Re: Sounds a typical

Sounds familiar.

In a previous job, the thing I had been warning for months would happen, happened, to within a few days of when I predicted. Had all the email I’d sent about it as evidence.

The moronic manager who should have acted and didn’t blamed me anyway. Said I hadn’t made the case strongly enough!

That company no longer exists and said manager went on to have a successful career at one of the outsourcing companies that’s always appearing in El Reg. Successful for him, not any of his clients, naturally.

In a world of infosec rockstars, shutting down sexual harassment is hard work for victims

Re: A problem of the basic paranoid and secretive nature of cybersec

Sounds like the harrassers are highly skilled And talented and simply need to be offered a opportunity

No. A fundamental personality trait of anyone working in security is that you can trust them to follow the rules/do the right thing, even if they think no one is watching. You watch them anyway, obv.

Azure Arc: Redmond's tool to wrangle services wherever they are – on-premises, cloud, your basement, in the pub...

This is pretty cool, you could already extend Azure Security Centre to on-prem and other clouds, so this just rounds it out.

How bad is Catalina? It's almost Apple Maps bad: MacOS 10.15 pushes Cupertino's low bar for code quality lower still

Re: Production machine?

If your business is say video production, then the desktop macs are production machines. Or if you use them for DTP, CAD, or anything similar.

We, Wall, we, Wall, Raku: Perl creator blesses new name for version 6 of text-wrangling lingo

Perl is the stupid programmers idea of a clever programming language.

US games company Blizzard kowtows to Beijing by banning gamer who dared to bring up Hong Kong

Re: Freedom-hating assholes

“Comments are disabled”

Of course they are.

Chef roasted for tech contract with family-separating US immigration, forks up attempt to quash protest

it can't be automatically and easily installed by the Ruby toolchain

Yes it can, with a one line change to a config file.

The gig (economy) is up: New California law upgrades Lyft, Uber, other app serfs to staff

Re: No more double-dip?

You aren’t “on the clock” with these companies, you are paid on a job-by-job basis. Workers clocked in are paid hourly even if there’s nothing for them to do. No driver is getting hourly pay from Uber just for having the app open.

Apple programs Siri to not bother its pretty little head with questions about feminism

such systems should be equipped with a wide variety available voices

Siri comes with male/female voices with English, American, Irish and Australian accents. Strongly suspect that critics of Siri being female aren't actually users of it, or they would know this.

I have mine set to Australian because it sounds the most natural. Or maybe Australians just sound robotic, that's why.

In Hemel Hempstead, cycling is as bad as taking a leak in the middle of the street

Re: Banning Cyclists

There is zero enforcement on cyclists as it is - when did you ever hear of the police arresting one for failing to stop at a red light, or riding on the pavement? Cyclists act as if the law doesn't apply to them, because it doesn't in practice!

Auditors bemoan time it takes for privatised RAF pilot training to produce combat-ready aviators

Re: "Auditors bemoan time it takes"

Remember that the RAF has shrunk from 75000 people in 1990 to 35000 today (on paper, actually probably much less).

Leaked EU doc plots €100bn fund to protect European firms against international tech giants

This sort of “picking winners” strategy gave us the mighty British Leyland