Posts by MrBanana

Astronomers find sugar near the creamy center of the Milky Way (no caramel, though)

Re: Tea

Well at the least, it should be a good Brownian motion generator.

KPMG's AI report becomes an accidental demo of AI hallucinations

I forwarded this to some friends with the subject "How stupid are they." It did not include a question mark.

Angry devs vow to flee GitHub Copilot as metered billing takes hold

Re: When someone has a youtube channel with over a million subscribers

I only occasionally post as AC, mostly because I can't remember my password and I'm using a system that isn't my own, and doesn't have my El Reg login details cached.

Re: The well-known name ranking

Sounds like it came from the marketing dept for a feminine hygiene product.

Frustrated franchisee sues Pizza Hut over crappy kitchen AI

Yup, definitely a case of not drinking your own champagne, but eating your own dog food.

Amazon rewards loyal Kindle devotees by closing the book on old e-readers

Re: Not a problem with my paper books

I guess you don't use cookbooks. All of mine have hand written details of what went right, and wrong with the recipe. Notes for accompanying side dishes, and who & when I served it to dinner guests. It will also be splattered in evidence of being used. I had a well used copy of Heston Blumenthal at Home, and was later given a personally signed copy. I re-gifted the signed copy as my scuffed up, annotated original was worth a lot more to me.

Minnesota State payroll problems grew after Workday launch, auditors say

Launch?

First read that as "payroll problems grew after Workday lunch" - I think we've all been there.

Artemis II blasts off on first crewed lunar mission since Apollo

April Fool

Come on, men flying to the moon? Is that the best you could come up with as an April 1st joke. Next up, you'll tell us that they have observed that the earth actually appears to be spherical - utter nonsense. I've got some magic crystals in the back of the van if you want to know the winner of the 2:30 at Lingfield Park next week.

Bundle of human neurons hooked to silicon learns to stumble through Doom

Igor!

Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: "Whose brain did you use?"

Igor: "Abby someone, err. Abby... Normal."

-- Mel Brooks, Young Frankenstein.

AWS says drones hit two of its datacenters in UAE, urges users to move resources to different regions

Yup, smoke computing. Just like voting for the pope - black/white smoke = binary 1/0. Not sure how you would construct a smoke based logic gate though.

Stop macOS 26 nagging with one tiny policy tweak

Re: It boggles the mind that they require an OS upgrade

Oh minutes, luck you! I used to dream of minutes of battery life on my old MacBook. Disconnect the power, and it immediately turned off. Also the trackpad was suspiciously domed where the dead battery pack had expanded. But still acceptable running Linux as controller for my 3D printer.

Avoiding an Apple payment account is nearly as bad as avoiding an Amazon Prime subscription.

There is plenty of non-Apple Store stuff available. Either directly from the app website, and Homebrew or MacPorts from the command line.

Altman: You think AI is wasted energy? Try raising 100 billion humans

"Water is totally fake," he said...

Any reason to read further than that statement, and not know he is a complete tool? No doubt that this assertion will be fed back into the AI model.

Re: 20 years?

Wow! What a world you have lived in. I was the bloke always picked second to last for making a team. Bridging sports - fencing, archery, martial arts or canoeing - you are joking? If you weren't in the football or rugby team you spent 90 minutes jogging round the outside perimeter of the school. Every Monday morning, every Wednesday afternoon.

Pop music fans literally dying to stream hot new albums – in car crashes, that is

Re: Touchscreens...

I use voice commands for all those sort of features. It doesn't work very well. Possibly because the system is rubbish (2021 Volvo), or because I'm shouting at a 1968 Alfa Romeo.

Re: Streaming eh?

Sure, but my vinyl player keeps skipping when I'm in the car.

Re: US Centric...check against vehicle category?

First off I read that as "gay Kia Souls". They have possibly turned into over compensating, gargantuan pickup owners.

IBM stock dives after Anthropic points out AI can rewrite COBOL fast

Language translation is (nearly) the worst option

Another problem with any computer language conversion is that it is a one way process. If you do a COBOL -> Java (for example) translation then you end up with code that can be compiled, but is a nightmare of unintelligible gibberish (I know, I know, just more so than usual Java code). If you need to make a functional change then you have to either make the change in in the Java code (and break the link to the reference implementation), or make the change to the source COBOL, and re-convert, and re-test everything. Neither option is desirable, and I would imagine that the other path of throwing everything away, and starting from scratch in a totally different but supported system, will be even more trouble. And you will have to fight off all the hungry consultant firms with your big, shitty stick, or be in their thrall for years to come. Did someone mention IBM?

The 13% fall has been generated by stock holders who know less about COBOL than my cat. They are a nervous bunch and easy to get the jitters. Especially when one of them sees "something, something, AI, something" and thinks it might be bad, so prods the rest of them to react.

Work experience kids messed with manager's PC to send him to Ctrl-Alt-Del hell

Is that what your scout master told you? - "Pull on my golden knob".

Qualcomm set to triumph in UK smartphone ‘patent tax’ case

Re: OTOH

Have you only just figured out that companies buyout other companies, only to destroy any competitiveness and steal their customer list.

Scientists show it's possible to solve problems in your dreams by playing the right sounds

Tesla also, and not in a dream, wanted to marry his favourite pigeon.

You can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone, says Dutch defense chief

eBay - he's right!

Damn it he's right, there are no F-35 buy it now listings on ebay.nl at the moment. Maybe I'll set a search trigger for ebay.ru.

You probably can't trust your password manager if it's compromised

Re: guide me

My partner has a password book. Just a small thing, about 3 x 5 cm.. It's written in historical order. No indexing of any kind. No method of recording real details. Just "the dog" as a random clue to something that is unlikely to be about a dog because we have never owned one. It makes sense to them, but is useless to me when I'm told to look up a username/password from 3 years ago.

Keir Starmer declares 'months' timeline for social media age clampdown in UK

Months to implement?

Even if it was going to be implemented at the end of the week. He will have U-turned before lunch on Thursday.

Dutch cops arrest man after sending him confidential files by mistake

And the two other cases involved?

I wonder what will happen to the evidence that was "gathered" in this escapade. Whatever evidence that was downloaded can now be claimed as compromised by the defence lawyer involved in that case. And whatever evidence the dimwit wanted to upload is pretty questionable as well.

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

Re: "we never loaned any of our tools to any of the non-IT staff ever again"

"Goes off mumbling into grey white beard."

I've gone from black, to distinguished, peppered, grey, white, and I'm now at filthy.

Re: software dev asking to borrow a screwdriver

Toasters and coffee machines - what a pain. A reverse Torx bolt, so you need a set of Torx sockets, and a strange oval headed bolt that you absolutely need the specialised bit for when recessed in a deep socket.

Windows 11 shutdown bug forces Microsoft into out-of-band damage control

Just wait a bit longer

Frustrated that you can't manually switch off your Windows machine? Don't worry, give it 10 more minutes, and it'll find a way to crash all by itself.

The world is one bad decision away from a silicon ice age

Not at the moment

"The US is more run by lawyers, concerned with regulation and process"

No, The US is now run by lawyers and other political shills, with a total disregard for regulation and process.

Brussels plots open source push to pry Europe off Big Tech

Re: Why don't they...

Not even a shop where you have to pay money. My local repair cafe will do a Windows 10 -> Mint service for nothing.

What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

Re: If you

As the tech adviser to my lecturer partner, I've had to fight with Eduroam at a number of international conference gigs. It's not pretty, can be difficult to troubleshoot, and nigh on impossible to fix as an end user. A lot of implementations rely on very specific, old, Windows and hardware set ups. Easier to workaround with my own Linux laptop, but a nightmare for more than 75% of the Windows users.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

The fuse protects the cable because copper was in short supply after the war, and a lot of rebuilding had to be done. So the ring main was conceived - a way of feeding high current to a single socket via two low capacity wires. A fuse after the socket, in the plug, was required to prevent overload of the ring.

Reddit sues Australia to exempt itself from kids social media ban

Re: It's Time To Reign In All Of Them

I cannot agree more with the treatment of them as publishers, not providers. Most countries have laws regarding any company setting themselves up as a publisher. Nominate them as such, and the laws have already been written.

Cloudflare suffers second outage in as many months during routine maintenance

Lupus

In much the same way that the first diagnosis by House, is Lupus. I'm gonna say DNS.

'Exploitation is imminent' as 39 percent of cloud environs have max-severity React hole

Re: WWW != Internet

A great IT Crowd episode. Sorry Jen.

Re: Cut the crud

I think all the HRdroids have been taken round the back of the shed, and are now replaced with AIdroids.

Lawyer's 6-year-old son uses AI to build copyright infringement generator

Re: He prompted his story generator to give him a story about Sonic the Hedgehog

Mommy daddy special games?

Another open source project dies of neglect, leaving thousands scrambling

Re: WTF?

It is really just the ignorant author assuming that the reader has the same level of knowledge they do. Would have it been such a stretch to write the less insulting: "If you weren't already aware, FFmpeg is ..."

Unofficial IETF draft calls for grant of five nonillion IPv6 addresses to ham radio operators

Agreed, but just because you can dish out that chunk of the available address space doesn't mean you should. I would also argue that unlimited resources promotes unlimited development and runtime excess, but limited resources leads to compact, lean solutions.

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

Re: Swap Shop

I took this an extra mile. It was Xenix, not DOS, but equally amenable to key swap shenanigans. Especially as you could remap keys in individual applications so the pesky A and S keys become logically swapped. But then, you actually physically swap the key caps on some poor bastard's keyboard. So some stuff works and some stuff doesn't - depending on when I cared to swap the key maps, which could be done remotely. This became even more hilarious as the "obvious hardware issue" causing his switched key issues got no better when the modified keyboard was swapped out with a regular one. I laughed for a couple of days until beer O'clock Friday lunch time, before we told him.

IBM cutting several thousand jobs in latest layoffs

Unsubscribe

Here we go again, this article appears every few months or so. Some detail changes to the numbers, locations, business units. But it's the same story - IBM are fucked. Customers of IBM - also fucked. Employees of IBM - fucked royally.

Students using ChatGPT beware: Real learning takes legwork, study finds

Give a man a fish and you feed him one meal. Teach a man to fish, and he'll spend his weekends in a small boat getting drunk.

Smile! Uncle Sam wants to scan your face on the way in – and out

Re: Face for Radio

"What's so special about a plane? It's not that different to other vehicles."

A car, or a bus, could be a mobile bomb, more so than the threat of an abandoned bag, or a waste bin full of Semtex. But I don't think it has happened yet. Planes being used as missiles, definitely been done before.

Re: I'm not planning to visit the United Hell Holes any time soon

Also, Harris stated that she would go with the same policies that Biden was running on. The Democrats bet the farm on being the incumbent. Not once, by continuing to endorse a very clearly (f)ailing president, but the doubling down on a hastily prepared candidate seeking the same, flawed mandate. 100 days is nowhere near long enough to mount a presidential campaign if your vice presidency was (at best) undistinguished, and following a "nothing changes" mantra only makes it worse. The democrats should have sidelined Biden after the mid terms and found a candidate that could be different, and better prepared to face Trump. Harris was unlikely to be that person, but at least she was able to walk and talk in a straight line without farting.

Turns out the end of Windows 10 is good for something: The PC refresh cycle

Time to move on

I volunteer for a couple of local Repair Cafes that offer Windows 10 -> Linux Mint migration for anyone with a laptop that can’t “upgrade" to Windows 11. Browser, email, document editor - that’s all they need, not a load of MS bloatware.

MIT boffins double precision of atomic clocks by taming quantum noise

Accuracy at last.

Now I don’t have to set the alarm early for 6:59 to make sure I get up exactly at 7:00:00.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Microsoft 364 trips over its own network settings in North America

You forgot to add ..."although it is 100% likely it will happen again".

Client defended engineer after oil baron-turned tech support entrepreneur lied about dodgy dealings

Re: Fairly Minor but...

It can happen. A friend of mine was in a family business which had a decent portfolio of small companies - import/export, plant hire, wholesale chain management, bulk storage, etc. But they were structured together in such a way that when one small part of the organisation started struggling, no mater how strong the rest were, it brought down the whole lot.

Space Shuttle war of words takes off as senator blasts 'woke Smithsonian'

Re: a lot to move 78 tonnes

"Others noted the costs for dredging canals to get a reasonable depth and for a ship capable of transporting a barge across the Gulf of Mexico."

The Gulf of Mexico - where's that?

But I guess if Trump can redefine its name, then he can just as easily sign an executive order to redefine its depth.