Posts by Lon24

The Linux mid-life crisis that's an opportunity for Tux-led transformation

Re: Capitalism at its finest

Yes, I remember the days when I bought most software. Only for the successful vendors to be swallowed up by bigger organisations who would close it down because it was competing too well with their own product, just let it die or blackmailed you with new terms/prices if you needed to stick with it.

FOSS was an immediate cost saving. More importantly successful products would prosper despite competition and be forked if they went bad. I went from Office2000 to OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. People say it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Office365 but escape was easier then than perhaps now. I don't think it damaged my business. Indeed the opposite.

i don't have to worry about Redmond playing around with my bottom line, changeable restrictive licences and the strategy of getting more revenue by forcing one into subs that, on paper, provide more unwanted functionality but just tighten the 'lock-in'.

BBC bumps telly tax to £180 as Netflix lurks with cheaper tiers

Re: Expat would like to pay but can't

BBC Radio services are available for, I believe, a limited time abroad via the app. iPlayer is only a VPN away if you put ethics aside.

It's major overseas problem is the rights issue which is a difficult one. One reason the licence fee could be useful is to connect it directly to the streaming services and attach the 'rights' to it. Then if any non-pats want to pay it too then it's more cash for programmes.

World Service should remain free for all. It's soft power and a lot cheaper than aircraft carriers.

"I can see it just coming under general taxation before this decade is out."

It is one solution. Is it really that different to the household of the situation when nearly every household had an aerial driven TV?

Except it would be a more progressive tax but the danger is that puts it directly under the diktat of the Treasury. Pleasing government rather than the audience becomes a greater incentive. People complain the BBC is too establishment biased but they wouldn't have seen anything yet. Trying to achieve the impossible task of being unbiased would simply be replaced by not trying. Replaced by swinging to be the current government's mouthpiece as in so many countries.

It's a difficult one. Subscriptions link usage to revenue. Popular programmes such as East Enders, the Archers and drama like Night Manager may be fine. But there is no incentive to provide a universal service. What happens to our six orchestras (and with that the Proms), the Russian & Persian World services - the music competitions - local news, reporters all over the world. I could go on. Indeed all the services Netflix et al do not do.

Do they matter or should we be prepared to take the cultural hit and attempts to get news to the parts of the world trying to suppres it? Everybody agrees the licence fee like democracy is broken. But the alternatives do have major downsides. I don't know the solution but the fundamental question is should we pay for things we don't use but are generally accepted as good for society?

That used to be unquestionable. But now it is. Beware of easy solutions to a very complex issue.

UK justice system unplugs from ancient datacenters after five-year slog

Re: Exclusive Pictures of ...

I read somewhere that the museum's 2966 EDS-80 drive controller went on the blink. It was replacsd by a specially programmed RaspberryPi.

Now I wonder what's now lurking in those "five large cpu cabinets"?

Exclusive Pictures of ...

The new temporary hosting facility

Supermarket sorry after facial recognition alert flags right criminal, wrong customer

Our local flagship Sainsbury's was on the trial with much publicity. Unsurprisingly shoplifting cratered. You would have to be particularly stupid to go there when there is a couple of other supermarkets a stones throw away.

Displacement is probably the major factor with these statistics.

'The EU runs on Microsoft' – and Uncle Sam could turn it off, claims MEP

"Flights from London to Amsterdam simply shouldn't exist given there's a perfectly good high speed railway"

I totally agree. I had to go there, transit time was not an issue. Going via Eurostar or Hook of Holland ferry was around £150/200. Easyjet was £25. I don't mind paying more to go green but that is getting very silly.

DRAM prices expected to double in Q1 as AI ambitions push memory fabs to their limit

Re: Loophole

Nah, Z-80 8 bit 64KB could be a peek into the future past

Palantir declares itself the guardian of Americans' rights

Does he care?

The ROI of the few million he bunged to a certain President will overjoy his techbro investors as government contracts shoot up and not just in Minnesota. Here in return for all our data they might help the NHS do something or other. And we are paying for it!

https://www.axios.com/local/denver/2025/10/23/palantir-donation-trump-white-house-ballroom

Elon Musk merges xAI into SpaceX to spread universal consciousness via a sentient sun

Re: "One can't deny that Musk is outstanding when it comes to vision."

Bah! Old Elon still falls short of our own true Sarf London Visionary.

Daedalus on the back page of New Scientist every week not only conceived of the inconceivable but mapped out the science to get there. if only he had a spare trillion to throw at it then we would have gone further than Mars. Well Calais anyway. While we started the massive overspend and delay of HS1 and the Elon orientated solution of boring a tunnel under the channel Daedalus came up with a much simpler solution.

No need to dig just get a freezing machine to created a tunnel of ice on the seabed. It would need some quantities of refrigerant and power but would give passengers a great view (and a joy to trainspotting fish). Sadly Daedalus has passed on. Here is his New Scientist epitaph

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

10 STOP

20 REBOOT

30 GOTO 10

Birmingham City Council's Oracle ERP fiasco now £144M and still not working

"Looking at the Wikipedia article it seems to have grown by agglomeration of a whole lot of borough councils."

Nope. The Wikipedia article on BCC says it absorbed only Sutton Coldfield in 1974.

I think you may be confusing Birmingham with the West Midlands Authority which includes the Black Country. Confusing the two is a hanging offence to all those who think we are all Brummies :-)

Over half of AI projects are shelved due to complex infrastructure

Re: So basically....

Indeed - the survey wasn't 100% failure. The problem isn't AI - it's us. Most folks who I talk to fall into two camps. Those that believe it's the answer to (almost) anything. If they have money or can con somebody else's money then it's likely to end badly. Then there are those that rubbish AI because it hallucinates or just gets thing plain wrong. As though their current operation doesn't have people who do just that.

We, (me included) are still very much on the learning curve of firstly differentiating 'AI' into the very different models initially concentrating on specialist applications where objectives, comparisons and guardrails can be clearly defined. In a sense these are the true pilot projects to grow our knowledge of applying a more general AI in wider contexts. in particular checking the integrity of the output. Something we are not particularly good at with humans.

The problem is investment is financed on explosive growth. That can only be achieved where a good number (most?) projects literally explode potentially taking down their owners with it. Tread gently but keep treading ...

Bond, debt bond: Investors shaken, not stirred by Oracle’s borrowing spree sue Big Red

There's massive demand for 'free' AI. You are getting it even if you didn't ask. Not so much for paid-for AI. Maybe very little for expensive AI. To balance the books it looks like it's going to have to be very expensive AI.

Maybe if Nvidia use technology to re-invent Grove's law of halving prices every year or so and coders (AI coders?) find away of compressing code. But it looks like its going the other way atm. Hence icon.

Lenovo has a hunch you’re about to try quitting VMware

Back to the Future

Problem: VM hosts need lots of RAM & Storage. This is now blowing new hardware investment budgets out of the water. While this would have been a brilliant idea a few months ago - now it may be more comfortable to keep paying the annual ransom on amortised cloud hardware. Short term thinking but, hey, long term thinking is so last year.

Developer writes script to throw AI out of Windows

Re: No kidding

Yep - free AI finds plenty of customers. Paid AI requires you to have a business case. They do exist but mass market? Prediction as MS limits 'free' Copilot so usage will shrink by a not much less.

This and similar projects don't touch revenue but will slightly reduce Microsoft's costs short term. Though much of the potential market may have dumped Windows already.

Don’t bother with the retailer’s website, says Google: Gemini can shop for you

I share my main credit card with my partner. How long before I'm asked to share it with my pet bot. Or will they have their own and just DD my bank account?

Not much of a jump as I think I'm one of an increasingly rare species not sharing my cc with my browser or shopping sites 'for my convenience'. Old fashioned enough to copy'n'paste the number in every purchase. Must waste 15 seconds of my life but imho worth it.

Been using Startpage for years. A sanitised Google from when Google was still the outstanding SE. But overtime the competition has got better and Google has enshitified itself. This may be the final nail in the coffin. I'm jumping ship starting with Duckie. What odds I'll need to come back?

Other suggestions welcome.

PC shipments set to hit the buffers as AI guzzles memory

Will shortage be an issue?

Yep, production of PCs and other devices may be curtailed by availability of ram and disk. Or will that constraint be less than the drop in retail demand as prices escalate?

2026 may have been a soft year for PCs anyway as those who had to move to Win11 have done so. The rest are content to keep running legacy versions of Window or a less resource demanding OS. With economic uncertainty capital requests from non-AI IT will have a hard time in corporate spend. Whereas AI projects will be orientated to evaluation and pilots rather than full blooded mass adoption especially as better kit is still just over the horizon both in GPUs and RAM

Not buying shares in Currys ;-)

Ofcom officially investigating X as Grok's nudify button stays switched on

Re: Wat will Grok take down ?

British porn startups like Onlyfans have been thriving. Their growth have been checked by Ofcoms insistance on age verification but not, as far as I know, by insisting that CSAM is a basic human right to be profitably enjoyed by any and everyone. And to say otherwise is censorship by fascists.

And Onlyfans is producing a rather better ROI than X.

We are not arguing about thresholds or difficulty in moderating but the threats of attacking the legal and governance of a democratic sovereign state and former ally.

However imperfect both our government and legal system threatened intervention by a third party that is proud to say it doesn't put our interests before theirs is just plain wrong on so many levels.

Cloudflare CEO threatens to make the Winter Olympics a political football after Italy slugs it with a fine

Confused (again)

What was the regulator actually asking?

If it was to block 1.1.1.1 resolving naughty.site to accesses from Italy - then that should be feasible while allowing other sites to resolve to the same IP - though 30 minutes would be challenging. If it's delivering the site through its CMS service - this shouldn't be difficult either. It shouldn't impact anybody else (or folks using a VPN). And presumably more people use 8.8.8.8 so did Google comply or whether they were not ordered?

Unless the regulator actually specified the IP and not naughty.site. That's downright technically stupid. That's what needs to be sorted. Resorting to the 'censorship/Trump' playbook instead of engaging constructively is going to hurt everybody, Cloudflare's reputation and Italy's sovereignty. Unless the Italian premiere is planning to use her mate Trump to leverage control of her own regulator.

Too much going on here.

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

Re: Hyundai is clearly a fan of P'Terry and Gaiman

Simples. Buy another car. If that doesn't fix it buy another. Repeat until bankrupt.

Accenture bets AI will ring up retail sales with Profitmind investment

It's dynamic pricing that gets me. You put stuff in a basket, hit checkout and website say the price has changed. Never downward.

Looking at you Easyjet. Bit difficult when on the other screen you have booked accommodation. I guess it's that 5 minutes you spent skipping/declining all the extras that you don't need. And going through the warnings you will be bankrupted if you don't take their travel insurance despite having some already.

I want to pay a clear understandable price. Must admit China's Aliexpress leads the field in indecipherable pricing. Designed for gamers not simple buyers.

Nothing to declare at border control except a Windows 7 certificate error

Re: Brum Airport

Except when I used to do it - Virgin was ridiculously expensive from London but Chiltern was ridiculously cheap - to Moor Street. Luckily a bus pass takes the strain out to Elmdon or whatever they call it nowadays. Stilll easier than getting to Heathrow.

Bank of England's Oracle cloud migration bill triples as project grinds on

Re: bunch of cowboys

Not cowboys. The BoE may be more like the (indigenous) Indians having the people, towns and villages pillaged - and worse!

AMD threatens to go medieval on Nvidia with Epyc and Instinct: What we know so far

Will nobody think about me?

AMD is throwing itself into a make or break competition with Nvidia for the AI business. Micron have dumped their consumer brand to go after the AI memory business. RAM and flash companies are swerving their output to AI.

Doesn't matter whether they will burn or prosper - their attention, investment and product is not coming my way. At the diminishing tail end of the business we have been dumped. Available consumer stock prices have escalated and expected to escalate more.

Yet until AI the consumer memory business was a profitable business. Still is though declining as more and more of us hold off upgrades or new kit because it's no longer cost effective. It's amazing how you can curb your demand for RAM or storage if you have to. Squeezing the accumulated bloat is not too difficult but is a one-time gain. Surely we are open to new entrants who ignore the risky and technically cutting-edge AI market to capture the steady and less technically demanding consumer market at what was profitable prices?

I've heard the Chinese DDR5 rumours but where else?

Logitech macOS mouse mayhem traced to expired dev certificate

Incompatibility can be good

I held off getting Logitech keyboards and mice because their supporting software was Win/Mac only and I run Debian.

But a good deal broke my resolve. No problem with drivers, it just worked (tm). In place of Options+ I installed Solaar for the extra options. Hence nothing goes back to the Logitech mothership (or v.v.). Solaar is open source unlike Options+ so naughtiness or breakages are a little harder to accomplish.

ChatGPT is playing doctor for a lot of US residents, and OpenAI smells money

Re: Almost funny...

I caught a hospital doctor using AI "just to tidy up his notes"

Nvidia DMs TSMC: Please sir can I have some more? The Chinese are starved for H200s

Re: Just take over Taiwan

Yep, but can the PoC win?

A Taiwanese retreat would surely raze the fabs. And the US would lighten their bomb bays to make sure. Problem is delaying until TSMC's new US fabs come online.

Tired of sky-high memory prices? Buckle up, we're in this for the long haul

Confused.com

So if AI/HBM and Consumer/DDR are two detached markets - why is exceptional future demand for HBM causing a current shortage in DDR? Two different markets should be reflected in two different investment cycles. Particularly because one is even more riskier than the other.

Certainly consumer demand (like mine) is cratering right now because of the surge. This should suggest inventories are rising. AI being an excuse for price gouging by a cartel? Surely not? Or could Win11 be blamed - why not? The standard retail environment has shifted from 8GB to 16GB desktops and laptops. A doubling in demand.

BBC tapped to stop Britain being baffled by AI

Re: Why a TV licence?

So are speed cameras. Getting people to pay up when they break the law is really a terrible idea. Whoever thought of it ;--)

Re: Why a TV licence?

.As an IT add-on. I, like many in the 90s learnt how to build websites from looking at the BBC source listing. I remember their first use of Tables. Mindbending at the time.

Earlier the BBC micro didn't play an unsubstantial role in creating a whole generation of IT nerds both in hardware and software - although I was a Tandy man!

Re: Why a TV licence?

It's very hard not to consume BBC content. Old stuff (from the glory years) turns up on endless non-BBC channels and Youtube. You are also contributing to underpinning British culture - music, the arts, production, writing and most other creative arts.

The BBC also has created markets like televisng live football (MOTD) and other sports that the richer (higher sub) companies bought out when the TV licence was not allowed to grow with costs.

There is also the moral argument that because one doesn't consume it - you break a system for the benefit of most of the rest of society. It's an argument similar to - why should I pay for healthcare for others if I'm healthy?

When the majority turn their backs on the BBC and its works - well the licence fee should be an issue. But, for value, the fee for at least 7 TV channels and dozens of radio channels without ads is stupendous value against what the streamers can offer in original content. Perhaps that's why they lobby against it. And without the competition their standards would inevitably decline damaging everyone.

Micron ditches consumer memory brand Crucial to chase AI riches

Ah yes. Was it 20 years ago? Made some money supplying and fitting RAM sticks to offices that had been raided overnight and their RAM expertly removed.

Will we see organised crime targeting minimally staffed AI bitbarns for juicy ram & gpus as prices become even more eye-watering?

Windows 11 still barely pulling ahead of 10 despite end-of-support push

$40? Uhmmm if only I could monetise my couple of unused/unwanted Win11 Pro licenses on my Chinese N100 boxes. That would have been the major chunk of the cost of the boxes. That's if a license fee was paid. Simple maths suggests it wasn't.

UK gov blames budget leak on misconfigured WordPress plugin, server

Re: Really?

The OBR head honcho has resigned. I guess others were using this as an excuse to get rid of him.

It was a stupid error made by an unthinking and probably low paid underling. Frankly board level folks wouldn't have a clue what a url is. The Website manager should. That's where the buck should have stopped and they be invited to leave the building pronto.

Whenever I have to upload an embargoed page I just do an .htaccess Redirect to a 404 or 'coming soon' page if you already have links setup in advance. Then unmodify ie insert # at the appointed time. Pretty simple with Apache.

Oh, and test I really can't see my own page.

Baikonur's only crew-capable pad busted after Soyuz flight

The clearing of the damage and fast rebuild in-situ with the associated lifting gear is just the people and equipment that may have been subborned as sappers and kit in the ongoing 'special military operation'.

That and Roscosmos being bust may make recovery a hard choice between the ISS and Putin's territorial ambitions.

Windows keeps obsolete strings forever to avoid breaking translations

Re: Ah yes, unnecessary strings

"... and yet, loads of perfectly fine machines were made obsolete by mandatory Windows 11 requirements."

Or enjoying a second life elsewhere they may never have known without Redmond's encouragement.

Microsoft wedges tables into Notepad for some reason

Re: What’s the point

Maybe after 40 years they had managed to get all the bugs out and need more to maintain compatibility with the mothership?

Moss spores bolted to the ISS exterior laugh in the face of hard vacuum

Or just a green moon. Better colonisers than us. As for greening the red planet ...

Anthropic is at the heart of the latest billion-dollar circular AI investment bonanza

Hot air (and water)

Still trying to get my head around computing capacity is now measured in GW.

What went wrong with megaflops or tokens? Or even abacus beads/sec. Bragging rights for power consumption/heat generated is the new sad world.

Google Chrome bug exploited as a 0-day – patch now or risk full system compromise

Do I need to panic?

Ditched Chrome years ago but it is never clear whether bugs are shared with Chromium and hence half the rest that use the same engine and can be identified as targets by their headers.

Maybe I should ask Microsoft ;-)

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: How long until it all goes FUBAR?

Lucky you. The rest of us taking public transport will be faced with people with nothing to do but stare/not stare at you and [$DIETY] forbid - even try and talk to you. The horror, the horror ....

Firefox adds AI Window, users want AI wall to keep it out

Re: A simple question

It is needed by the folks next door who lives off app ordered cardboard coffee & plastic sandwiches deliverooed to their front door at great expense while I have a kettle, loaf of bread and a little imagination for lunch.

Don't underestimate the 'free' slop market that can be created by marketing. Though revenue is probably vastly overestimated by the gold rush llm companies.

IMHO there is no one alternative browser. I run Vivaldi & Librewolf. V for my regular browsing and L for unknown territory. Plus they have different underlying engines (Gecko & Chrome) if you encounter a rendering issue.

Other combinations may work better for other people. But the whole joy is choice. If only one had time to test them all.

Hence my choice was heavily influenced by previous recommendations to similar questions in these columns. So thank you Registerites.

To solve compatibility issues, Microsoft would quietly patch other people's code

Re: Of course not!

Been there, got the T-shirt.

Having been on Linux for 10 years appears to make me some kind of guru. So when anybody's PC starts to misbehave family and ex-friends call me to fix their Win10/11 machines. Except my MS experience died with XP (and 48 hours failing to get Vista to talk to my network).

So they actually know more about their setups than me. Not entirely ex-MS - I'm just celebrating getting Windows 95 working as a VM on my laptop Debian Trixie. WfW next?

Britain's first small modular reactors to be built in Wales

Re: Sounds dystopian.

Anglesey is connected to the mainland by two bridges and ample power connections able to deliver power from the retired higher powered nuclear plant to the mainland.

The sparse population is seen as a cynical benefit if nuclear goes mushroom shaped.