Posts by Will Godfrey

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

A simple question.

Will the single person who actually likes printers please raise their hand.

... assuming they exist

European biz calls for Euro tech for local people

Re: GendBuntu - Gendarmerie Nationale with 73 000 seats

Interesting, and well done for sticking with this. I wonder just how much they are saving.

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

Re: Obvious synergy

I said nothing of the sort!

{mutter}{mutter}

Come on Elon

Surely a man of your undoubted brilliance would be able to design and make them yourself... and betterer than anybody else.

Hyperconverged infrastructure is so hot right now it needs liquid cooling

Re: Runtime with defective cooling

Maybe they just need to hyperventilate.

Hey! Don't push. I was already leaving.

Developer scored huge own goal by deleting almost every football fan in Europe

It never gets old

Working on production code? I learned many moons ago that doing that even on relatively unimportant systems will almost always result in unexpected consequences.

P.S. Yes, it took a few panics for that to sink in.

MX Linux 23.6 brings Debian freshness, without the systemd funk

Re: Fiddly?

If you find out, can you let me know? I also run devuan, and didn't find anything particularly 'strange' when I first tried it.

I have it on an elderly Intel laptop, a newer general purpose Intel desktop and a much newer AMD machine I use for music creation. Oh, and not forgetting a handful of ubiquitous Raspberry Pi's

China names alleged US snoops over Asian Winter Games attacks

Mad (magazine)

Spy V Spy anyone?

Google Cloud’s so-called uninterruptible power supplies caused a six-hour interruption

Were they swollen?

Re: Unbelievable

Shirley, nobody would do that

Unbelievable

A battery failure should never take anything else down!

I can remember seeing a bit of military kit in the 1960s (government surplus place in Reading) that solved the problem quite simply. There were two identical lead/acid batteries with series fuse and diode, so whichever had the highest voltage delivered the current (although I suspect the battery internal resistances meant they both delivered some current). Recharging/trickle balance was done with separate fuse and current limiting resistor combos. These days I would have thought a UPS for something as important as a major data centre would have done very considerably better.

P.S. There was a guy who worked there who was very informative and helpful to us youngsters. Can't remember his name after all these years :(

Dot com era crash on the cards for AI datacenter spending? It's a 'risk'

Re: Apples and Oranges

While I agree with you overall, I would note we already have the ultra rich and the ultra poor. However, I think the number of the former is shrinking while the number of latter is definitely expanding.

Southern Water uses Capita's AI tool to flush customer complaints

Ugh!

Unfortunately, being in darkest Kent I'm one of their customers victims, and can't exactly decide I want to use a different supplier.

There is no shortage of leaks round here - so plenty of opportunity for no-notice roadworks and weeks of snarled up traffic.

BOFH: There's a fatal error in the blinkenlights

Beat me to it

Oracle says its cloud was in fact compromised

oracle?

Yes! It most certainly is. You ask it the right question and it splurts out everything it knows.

How do you explain what magnetic fields do to monitors to people wearing bowling shoes?

Re: Not magnetic field, more star field?

Yes is should be, but would probably have the opposite effect.

One of the last of Bletchley Park's quiet heroes, Betty Webb, dies at 101

A good age

Sad to see her gone, but she had done far more with her life than most of us will ever achive.

R.I.P.

Tech support session saved files, but probably ended a marriage

Re: Tyrant sounds familiar

A cleverly 'coded' one I saw was:

'Z' was employed by us from year 'n' to year 'm'. We had no issues with his time keeping.

Palantir suggests 'common operating system' for UK govt data

Annihilation

The fox has truly taken ownership of the hen house

Linus Torvalds forgot to release Linux 6.14 for a whole day

Re: Even if it is "ok" ...

I disagree.

Fully accepting having made a very minor mistake and correcting it within 24 hours is an excellent way to run a project.

Can you think of anyone who has done better?

Oops, they did it again: Microsoft breaks Outlook with another dubious update

It's quite simple really...

People just need to call Outlook by it's 'true' name...

Look-Out!

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

So absolutely true!

Lovely twist at the end :)

Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller now available to mere mortals

Re: Bargain!

Actually, it's cheaper than chips in London

Vivaldi 7.2 browser wants to topple tech's feudal lords

Re: Perhaps I'm missing something. . .

My personal website runs with just basic HTML and a bit of CSS. The family are convinced I have some special web code that makes it load almost instantly.

I've long since stopped trying to explain the reality to them

China's EV champ BYD reveals super-fast charging that leaves Tesla eating dust

YMMV

If I had a car with something like a 300 mile actual range, I wouldn't be the slightest bit bothered about how long it took the battery to recharge. The longest drive I make is 220 miles, after which I'm out walking the Derbyshire Dales for a couple of days, then it's short hops around the county to more walking locations before the next significant drive - home.

However, at 76 it's unlikely I'd be able to afford such a car before I'm too old to drive.

Starliner astronauts' stay drags on as Crew-10 launch scrubs

Weird

There seem to be a lot of problems with space craft lately.

Britain dusts off idle spectrum for rail and emergency comms

Nexus Alpha

That was just the customer information system. Rather clever actually. These were dotted round the country and platform / remote screens updated via pager messages.

They've come on a long way since those early days.

CISA pen-tester says 100-strong red team binned after DOGE canceled contract

FTFY

USA technological security was kinda a big deal, even to us on the other side of the pond.

P.S. No, I didn't downvote you.

Crypto takes a dip as Trump signs Bitcoin Reserve order

Meh!

Any statement by Trump is like the English weather - wait five minutes and it will change.

Do you DARE? Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing sovereignty

Good!

With America becoming steadily more unstable and China being... well... China, a European alternative is overdue.

Scotland now home to Europe's biggest battery as windy storage site fires up

Re: This is great news but...

Do you really think all those people will be running their TV 24hrs a day? Even in Scotland it's unlikely they'd be running lighting to that extent.

Added to which this would only be drawn on while none of the renewable sources were providing power directly.

Microsoft signed a dodgy driver and now ransomware scum are exploiting it

There are plenty of "tools" - mostly in upper management.

Re: Legacy code strikes again!

Nice idea, but this would hit small companies really hard. The big ones would simply restructure, move contentious code to new entities and sell them off, thus absolving themselves of any future responsibility.

Altnets told to stop digging and start stuffing fiber through abandoned pipes

Not necessarily metal

Something that may be of interest (took a while to track it down again)

http://www.fombl.org.uk/wp.html

Re: This is th UK

We seem to have great difficulty in persuading people to recognise that fact. (note: not 'convincing' people)

Does terrible code drive you mad? Wait until you see what it does to OpenAI's GPT-4o

Re: Evil

Hey! You leave the 6502 alone! It was my first intro to assembler - real? programming (on the BBC Model B) and I won't have any wet-behind-the-ears numpty dissing it.

{nor anyone one else, come to that}

Interesting finding

Sort of obvious once you see it, but not so obvious before when all you've seen is all the feel-good advertising.

Google binning SMS MFA at last and replacing it with QR codes

Re: Downward spiral

Spooky coincidence!

I didn't have any choice about whether I'd have them either.

Downward spiral

The only smart thing here is between my ears... and my sisters sometimes question even that!

How am I supposed to even receive the QR code let alone interpret it.

Southern Water takes the fifth over alleged $750K Black Basta ransom offer

WHY?

.. is a report detailing the ransom amount of a UK water company not quoted in good old pounds sterling?

Hey programmers – is AI making us dumber?

Re: Nearly there

Indeed so!

They were very cleverly thought out and written. I think Azimov understood people very well indeed.

Dark mode might be burning more juice than you think

Re: Anothere total waste of your TV License £££ by Britain's Biggest Crooks!

Great find. Have one of these as well as an up vote.

My pet peve

... is software with a fixed low-contrast dark theme. For me this is unusable.

I try to ensure all the software I use (or create) has a number of theme options, and personally like an overall mid-range brightness with good range of colours and saturation.

If you're working in a dark environment, why not turn down the brightness and contrast on the laptop/monitor? If the controls aren't available maybe you shouldn't have gone for the cheapest box-shifter.

Odds of city-killer asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting Earth creep upward

The Commentards are on form to day

Title says it all!

P.S. We need a happy bouncy icon.

Microsoft boffins promise entire game worlds made from AI slop

Meh!

Sounds like a game's death sentence. I'm not a gamer anyway - never enough time apart from anything else.

Time to make C the COBOL of this century

Maybe there's something wrong with me

but I like coding with C

GNOME 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin

No Thanks

I avoid gnome like the plague. As far as I'm concerned it manages to get just about every desktop feature wrong.

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

Never had to suffer this sort of crap.

I was lucky - especially with my last employer (which I stayed with for 20 years). Their idea of management was to make sure we had the tools and facilities we needed and defend us from unreasonable customers.

Broadcom reportedly investigates acquiring Intel’s chip design biz

Bye bye Intel

They were rather a curate's egg, but produced some good stuff.