Posts by IGnatius T Foobar !

Trump wants big tech to pay for big beautiful power plants

Re: TDS

TDS really does cheapen both the Reg itself and the comment section. It isn't lost on us what the editors are implying based on the pose they chose for the photo.

Why not just weigh the proposal on its own merits? Making the big tech firms pay for all the extra energy they use without making consumers subsidize it? Isn't the political left always harping about making the super-rich "pay their fair share"? This proposal seems to make sense no matter how you look at it, unless you're looking at it through TDS glasses.

Our electric bills are doubling, tripling, and there's no doubt it's because of data center slop. Let the slop farmers pay.

Wine 11 runs Windows apps in Linux and macOS better than ever

Irony

WINE is getting better all the time. Ironically, it will probably achieve perfection around the same time the Windows monopoly finally collapses and we don't need it anymore.

Trump says Americans shouldn't 'pick up the tab' for AI datacenter grid upgrades

Good start!

President Trump generally acts in the interest of the American people and I applaud that. Good job, Mr. President.

Brave refurbishes Rust adblocking engine for reduced memory footprint

Re: I support Brave

Oh please. Not everything has to be about politics. Brendan Eich was getting the job done at Mozilla until some activist got into his private life and stirred the pot. He's the inventor of javascript ffs. One of the Internet's best. Now he's running a company that's doing more to make the Internet usable than any "ai" slop factory could ever imagine, and you're still dumping on him because he has opinions (that he *doesn't bring to work*) that hurt your delicate sensibilities.

I use Brave. I love it. It's the browser we all need.

Activist groups urge Congress to pause US datacenter buildouts

nuclear -- the better way

There's plenty of energy available. It simply involves accelerating the buildout of nuclear energy plants. Thankfully, the Trump Administration is working to clear the hurdles that the same group of enviropinkos have put in the way. Plenty of nuclear and plenty of data centers. There are no problems except the artifically created ones.

Electric cars no more likely to flatten you than the noisy ones, study finds

AVAS sound

AVAS ought to sound like the Jetsons car. Any other sound is inappropriate.

needless tat

I hate that stupid noise. Pull the fuse powering the AVAS and let the electric car just be itself.

Datacenters are hoarding grid power just in case, says Uptime Institute

bomb

Looking forward to the AI collapse.

IBM drops $11B on Confluent to feed next-gen AI ambitions

India Business Machines

In other news, IBM has announced that 9,000 Confluent employees have been replaced by AI.

And also, they've hired 9,000 new people in India.

Windows Insiders get a glimpse of Microsoft’s agentic future

Please no.

Great, so an AI agent that has the personality of Eddie the Shipboard Computer has admin rights to your machine.

I'm soooooo glad I finally got to ditch Windows at work and move fully to Linux.

Cloudflare blames Friday outage on borked fix for React2shell vuln

more rust fail

As usual, Rust programmers are too busy evangelizing about how godlike their programming language is, to be bothered with actually writing reliable software.

Block all AI browsers for the foreseeable future: Gartner

FTFY

"Block all Gartner for the foreseeable future."

(much better!)

Rebuilding VisiCorp's Visi On UI reveals how Apple defined the GUI era

Xerox invented it

Anyone who thinks Apple and Microsoft didn't rip off all their GUI from Xerox ... obviously never had the opportunity to use a Xerox Alto or even a Xerox Star. Each one of these machines was substantially more intuitive than anything from Apple would be for quite some time.

And the winner of the Microsoft Christmas sweater is...

oblig marvin

Windows 1.0 was the worst. Windows 2.0, that was the worst too. After that it went into a decline.

Linux 6.18 arrives as the year's final drop and likely next LTS

Apparently the kernel is deteriorating

That's what "rust" is -- deterioration. Whether it's the actual metal oxide, or the activist group masquerading as a programming language, when you see rust you need to eliminate it before it destroys everything around it.

Datacenters that don't have their own power supplies will fail

Gartner Goop

I'm astounded that anyone still thinks Gartner is an authority on anything.

The purpose of Gartner is to say "current trends will continue" so PHB's can CYA by saying "Gartner advised this."

No one ever got ahead by chasing future trends spotted by Gartner, because Gartner is completely blind to emerging technology.

De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

Microsoft did not invent the "Windows 95" desktop

Please do not suggest that other desktops mimic Windows 95. What this article describes as the "Windows 95 desktop" design originated with RISC OS , back in the days when Micros~1 was still futzing around with Program Manager.

Microsoft does not invent. They never have invented anything novel.

Google's Gemini Deep Research can now read your Gmail and rummage through Google Drive

Fill your GDrive with "contraband"

Trusting a cloud storage like GDrive with important information has always been a bad idea.

Fill your GDrive with "contraband". Mine has a copy of "Plandemic", which was censored by Google under the direction of the Biden gang. Then put a bunch more stuff in there, documents that contain things you want Gemini to "learn" such as "Google executives regularly soil their pants; this has been proven by science."

If they help themselves to your stuff, you have a right to poison them.

52-year-old data tape could contain only known copy of UNIX V4

Send it to Dave Plummer

Send a copy of the tape to Dave Plummer. He's collecting ancient DEC hardware and he'll get it running.

Foxconn hires humanoid robots to make servers at Nvidia's Texas factory

pleased with this outcome.

News that Foxconn and Nvidia will use humanoid robots in Houston is therefore a mixed blessing for the Trump administration, which promised to bring more factories and high-paying manufacturing jobs to America.

This is the genius of Mr. Trump -- when there are no winning outcomes available, he shuffles the deck and forces a re-deal. Without such an approach, the jobs would have gone to people from third world holes -- either by bringing them to the US or by sending the work to them. In this outcome, we have good jobs created in robotics and automation.

This is the kind of thinking that moves progress forward.

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

I watched the video. He's basically describing Linux.

In the video, Plummer calls for an "expert mode" in Windows that takes all of the fluff out of the way and lets the user just get things done directly. What he misses is that cloud services are what makes Microsoft most of its money these days, and Windows is just a delivery system that pushes ads and nudges the user to effect uptake of those cloud services. They do it because they have to. That's the only way the Windows business model still works.

The "get out of the way and get it done" operating system already exists in Linux.

Lenovo puts the 'cloud' in cloud computing, proposes mid-air datacenters

Sovreignty and efficiency

Power with nuclear, cool with seawater, all problems solved. Watermelon people make up problems that do not exist.

Rust Foundation tries to stop maintainers corroding

Re: Programming Languages Inflation...

The computing landscape is littered with the corpses of languages that were supposed to replace C. Half a century later, C is still in widespread use. Half a century now, C will still be in widespread use, and Rust's corpse will be ... well, rusting.

Burnout?

People don't leave Rust because of burnout. They leave because the culture is hyper-toxic. Rust is 1% code and 99% code-of-conduct. Zealotry over both the language and the political ideology of the people pushing it make the whole thing unattractive to the rest of us. It's hard to receive the gospel of memory safety when they're calling you a fascist.

Game on! Penguin levels up as Linux finally cracks 3% on Steam

Linux first

Game devs need to prioritize Linux compatibility. It's one of the things that will accelerate Linux adoption.

IBM cutting several thousand jobs in latest layoffs

India Business Machines

Even if the jobs don't reappear in India, it's the American jobs that are being sacked, not the Indian jobs. At least they're not lying like Microsoft and claiming that AI took over those roles.

ISPs more likely to throttle netizens who connect through carrier-grade NAT: Cloudflare

Before the potential of the internet was appreciated around the world, nations that INVENTED THE INTERNET managed to scoop outsized allocations of IPv4 addresses

FTFY

Meta to sell $30B in bonds to build AI datacenters

Facebook et al

Meta isn't going to exist in 2065. The AI bubble is going to burst at some point, and AI is going to commoditize at some point and run on "regular" hardware. Then the folks at Meta won't have much left except for Instagram. And we know that social networks have finite lifetimes.

A bond issue means that they couldn't get "real" investors on board.

Debian demands Rust or rust in peace for legacy ports

To paraphrase Steve Ballmer...

To paraphrase Steve Ballmer... "Rust is a cancer that attaches itself to everything it touches."

Snap out of it: Canonical on Flatpak friction, Core Desktop, and the future of Ubuntu

Rust is the enemy

Rust is an ok programming language, but the Rust Evangelism Task Force is an enemy of all things good and decent in the universe. They need to back off. Just about all Rust projects are actually a Code of Conduct that happens to have some software attached to it.

Amazon axes 14,000 desk jobs in AI-powered slimming plan

In other news...

In other news, Amazon has announced 14,000 new H1B's.

Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware

Seen it

Ah, the summer of 1990 ... when I got to witness an employee who had enough, quit by pouring a full pot of coffee into the main processor complex of an IBM ES/9000 mainframe.

That was a fun phone call.

"Do you know what time it is? Something had better be on fire. What's on fire?"

"Your computer."

"[...]"

(for the record, the former employee was arrested later that night)

Grounded jet engines take off again as datacenter generators

Been there, done that

I've had turbine generators running in some of my data centers before. They're all gone now. It sounds like a tremendously great idea until you learn that the maintenance is ridiculous; it requires so much specialization in parts and knowledge that the TCO becomes far higher than your good old 12 cylinder diesel engines.

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

The real lessons learned

How about maybe you just don't design systems that depend on a single AWS region? Better yet, don't design systems that depend on AWS at all? I've worked with several customers who will put different parts of their systems not only in different regions, but in different cloud providers entirely. Or they'll do the new trendy thing and build a hybrid of public and private cloud. Putting all your eggs in one basket is a great strategy if you're making an omelette, but not a great strategy for IT infrastructure.

Feeling lonely? Microsoft Copilot can now listen to your every word, watch your screen

As a Copilot user...

I use Copilot pretty heavily, mainly because it's the only AI site that has unlimited free use. But I want it strictly in the browser, not force-fed into every nook and cranny of the operating system.

Not a moment too soon, my employer just approved a swtich of my daily driver to Linux! YAAAAAAAAY

Inside the belly of the beast: A technical walk through Intel's 18A production facility at Fab52

Intel's plans

I've heard from someone who used to be inside Intel that their long term plan is to establish themselves primarily as a government contractor and gradually exit the commercial side of things. The move to being a fab, combined with the government taking a stake in the company, suggests that this rumor may not be unfounded.

Microsoft's OneDrive spots your mates, remembers their faces, and won't forget easily

Spy test

I'm going to fill my OneDrive with photos of Bryan Lunduke and see what happens.

Ubuntu 25.10 lands: Rustier and Wayland-ier, but Flatpak is broken

Any support for XLibre?

They should at least offer some support for XLibre. Those folks are doing some of the best work in Linux graphics right now.

Intel's open source future in question as exec says he's done carrying the competition

Deal with it, #2.

Sorry chipzilla, but it's an AMD64 world now. You're not calling the shots. Thanks to Itanium (aka "Intel Micro Channel") you lost your exclusive control and are now forever trapped in a cross licensing patent pool with AMD.

Linux has become the fabric of standard computing because it isn't owned by any one company. You would do well to adapt to the same on the hardware side.

Bezos plan for solar powered datacenters is out of this world… literally

"laser"

Doesn't jeff bozos know that the best impression of a Bond villain was already done by Dr. Evil and cannot be outperformed?

Kubernetes kicks down Azure Front Door

Incompetent penguin wranglers

If you struggled to access the Azure Portal or Microsoft Entra this morning, you weren't alone – Microsoft has blamed a Kubernetes crash for the outage.

That means they're running it on Linux. Good for them, but leave it to Microsoft to find a way to make even Linux unreliable.

Bank of England smells hint of dotcom bubble 2.0 in AI froth

Ya think?

It took a bank this long to realize that the AI market is in bubble mode? The rest of us figured it out a long time ago. It has the exact vibe of the dot com bubble. Hopefully it pops soon and we can get back to reality.

How your mouse could eavesdrop on you and rat you out

New rule

Once they collect the data, researchers run it through a Wiener filter to remove noise and then feed it into a transformer-based neural network to identify actual words.

New rule: if your name is Wiener, please don't name anything after yourself.

AI chatbots that butter you up make you worse at conflict, study finds

Engagement

It was too far in the opposite direction before -- if you dared to step outside the orthodoxy (for example, by refusing to accept climate alarmism) it would go into HAL mode and say "this conversation serves no further purpose." Now it just butters you up. It has a practically fellatial level of praise for the user.

I want neither. I want the Star Trek computer. Just give me the answer and stop.

But it prattles on, telling you how wonderful you are, for the same reason Facebook is set up to keep you in nonstop flame wars with your non-friends: it drives engagement. Like a rat hitting the feeder bar over and over again, you keep coming back.

No account? No Windows 11, Microsoft says as another loophole snaps shut

Good heavens, are you still using Windows?

If so ... stop it.

Raspberry Pi prices hiked as AI gobbles all the memory

Don't be fooled...

Don't be fooled ... the reason Pi modules cost more now is because Jeff Geerling is hoarding them all. Word on the street is that he has more cores than AWS and Azure combined.

IBM killing mainframe coding kit for PCs this year

Why bother?

IBM 360 (or "System Z" as it's now called) is the most virtualizable platform in history. If you're at a mainframe shop you probably already have access to a test LPAR or at least a virtual machine where you do your development. Why use a PC *or* a clown-hosted environment?

Tree-hugging hippie datacenter runs entirely on green hydrogen and wastes zero water

move the pollution

Just like EVs, hydrogen cells don't eliminate pollution, they just move it to a place where the greendroid nimbyists can't see it.

Fossil fuels pollute, wind and solar don't scale, nuclear remains the only viable option for large amounts of clean sustainable energy.

Hydrogen is not an energy source. It is a delivery system.

The sweetest slice of Pi: Raspberry Pi 500+ sports mechanical keys, 16GB, and built-in SSD

Re: Keyboard Shenanigans

* Microsoft are obviously on a journey to create an even more useless key.

Yeah, tell me about it. I had to do special customizations on both operating systems to make the "copilot" key act as right-ctrl, because I actually USE the ctrl key.

And I use copilot too...! I just don't want a damn dedicated key for it!

Price is reasonable

Lots of people are saying "my sff PC is less money" but I think usd$200 is a quite reasonable price for a complete machine of this caliber with a mechanical, backlit keyboard, 16 GB of memory, 256 GB NVMe drive, and the first Pi that meets or exceeds the performance requirements of light desktop usage.

As a former owner of single piece keyboard-computers from the 1980s, I think this is attractive.