* Posts by sammystag

27 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2020

Google finally addresses those bizarre AI search results

sammystag

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

My house is an aggregate of bricks, mortar, tiles and other building materials. This doesn't make a brick a house.

AI PCs: 'Something will have to give in 2025, and I think it's pricing'

sammystag

Was it meant to be or is it planned obsolescence? The hardware requirements seem rather fishy to me. Not sure it takes a hardware upgrade to move the start menu to the middle of the task bar.

Windows 10 given an extra year of supported life, for $30

sammystag

Re: Cruel

It certainly might help. This was the push I needed to install Mint on my old but still good laptop.

The OS is increasingly irrelevant. How many users need anything that isn't available on Windows, Linux and Mac?

Moving for me highlighted just how shit Windows is nowadays. I now have an OS that can cope with a USB-C monitor with integrated hub without having to plug it in three or four times before the keyboard and mouse work. Better still, it includes a scanner tool that can handle multiple pages and create a PDF without having to search for a free replacement for the crap in Windows. I can use Docker without a massive faff involving WSL. Brilliant! There's certainly no going back.

Combustion engines grind Linus Torvalds' gears

sammystag

Re: Hmmmm...

If it were 100% efficient surely you wouldn't expect a full battery in any case. Work has been done moving the vehicle.

Microsoft remains massively profitable, investors await AI payoff

sammystag

Re: A New World

XP was also alright

FYI: Data from deleted GitHub repos may not actually be deleted

sammystag

Re: "this is expected and documented behavior inherent to how fork networks work"

You've asserted twice that the "vast majority" or "vast numbers" of git users have "no idea" how it works. What are you basing that on? I'm a daily user of git, so are all my colleagues, we know how it works or we couldn't use it effectively. Who are the users that don't know how it works? I would expect most git users to be developers whose job it is to understand this stuff.

CISA looked at C/C++ projects and found a lot of C/C++ code. Wanna redo any of it in Rust?

sammystag

Re: Yees but ..

That's true and I've seen Java code that had to be restarted every day to avoid OutOfMemoryErrors. Almost always as a result of caching in my experience. I've not seen it create a security problem though, rather reliability problems

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

sammystag

Re: Everybody forgets Informix

Cheers, sounds like we weren't the only ones then

sammystag

Re: Everybody forgets Informix

I used Informix on a project in the late 90s as a whippersnapper. It seemed fine until someone from Informix had to come out and fix the database for us armed with a magic floppy disk. It had run out of storage and it was apparently impossible for us to fix ourselves because any operation, including anything that might have freed up space, required it to log that (maybe it was the rollback logs, this was all new to me at the time) and it couldn't - there was no space to do so.

No doubt there was incompetence on our part involved, and probably someone here can explain why that's all bollocks and that we could have fixed it, but that's how it played out. We stuck to Oracle and Db2 after that.

Doom turns 30, so its creators celebrate seminal first-person shooter’s contribution to IT careers

sammystag

As teenagers we installed Doom on a friend's family PC. The born again Christian mother was so horrified by the demons and inverted crucifixes that after uninstalling the game, the PC has to be taken to church to be prayed over by the congregation in some kind of exorcism

Apple swipes left on the last Touch Bar Mac, replaces it with a pricier 14″ model

sammystag

You'd have to mad to pay that kind of money for an 8GB machine which presumably cannot have more RAM added in what is almost 2024. I have a 16 GB Mac from work and it still ends up swapping.

Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data

sammystag

Victim blaming

So a customer who fails to have adequate backups deserves to have criminals attacks its IT and destroy its data? You actually think that? All the hobbyists running little niche websites in their spare time to support some community or other deserve to have it all destroyed and lose all their email because they didn't have the money, time or expertise for off site backups? Yes hardware failures can happen but they are relatively rare and the storage, one would hope, would be resilient and replicated. People make a choice whether to accept that risk or not. Doesn't mean they deserve to have criminals destroy it on purpose.

Rocky Linux details the loopholes that will help its RHEL rebuild live on

sammystag

Re: Licence

Thanks, makes sense. That's unfortunate

sammystag

Re: Licence

I'm not sure that's right. It might be, I'm not a lawyer. My understanding is that I could fork the Linux kernel and distribute my fork under a licence with additional terms as long as it complies with all the requirements of GPL2 . If that's true, wouldn't if follow that the main project could change licence for future releases requiring source of any derivative works to be published openly to everyone?

sammystag

Licence

Perhaps a silly question but if the Linux community is so outraged by Red Hat's actions, can we expect a license change to the Linux kernel along with the multitude of other upstream components Red Hat uses forcing them to make their source code freely available if they want to make use of any future release? The options for Red Hat would then be release their source code or maintain their own fork of today's latest version of whatever they use.

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

sammystag

Re: Bit klunky, but...

Martin, it's all very complicated which is perhaps why you don't know what you are talking about here.

Twitter layoffs were bad but Meta's mass ejections could take the cake

sammystag

Re: Well, you're working for the Evil Empire, you deserve it

I think that's a bit unfair tbh. Aren't the Empire grunts conscripts?

How important are tech and other contractors to UK? PM candidate promises tax review if elected

sammystag

Another shitty policy unless she's going to also look into Yorkie bars

Sony Interactive Entertainment pulls PlayStation from Russia

sammystag

Re: In a word....PR!

Do they make money from selling the consoles? Certainly back in the day Sega as Nintendo didn't. Would expect most of the profits come from selling games to existing owners with a bit from expensive controllers and so on

Sweden asks EU to ban Bitcoin mining because while hydroelectric power is cheap, they need it for other stuff

sammystag

Re: I second that request.

That's the stupidest shit I've ever read on a Reg forum, which is no mean feat

Windows 11 comes bearing THAAS, Trojan Horse as a service

sammystag

Re: "and in a few short years we were liberated."

> Try finding an Android that doesn't have Google Play, Gmail and a variety of other Google apps bundled in

Kindle Fire

Fastly 'fesses up to breaking the internet with an 'an undiscovered software bug' triggered by a customer

sammystag

Re: Credit where it's due

To answer your answer in one single word - bollocks

While it has its risks, cloud providers have massive advantages of scalability, expertise, etc. An in-house team of sys admins is unlikely to be able to keep up in the same way, be available around the clock, not be ill, not go on holiday, not be a bit shit at their jobs, be up to date on every patch and new feature. I've had far less trouble on AWS than I used to frequently had with teams of incompetent DBAs, Unix admins stuck in the eighties, etc - all blaming the devs of course and putting up roadblocks to getting to the bottom of things

The killing of CentOS Linux: 'The CentOS board doesn't get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do'

sammystag

On the bright side

The bewildering number of choices for my next desktop or production distro just got smaller now that I can ignore CentOS, Fedora and RHEL

Watchdog urges Tesla to recall 158,000 Model S, X cars to fix knackered NAND flash that borks safety features

sammystag

Re: Great

This article is quite interesting in explaining the problem https://insideevs.com/news/376037/tesla-mcu-emmc-memory-issue/

Tesla's response has been woeful - eventually owning up to the issue but only agreeing to fix it once the car is broken and if it's done less than 100k miles. https://electrek.co/2020/11/09/tesla-emmc-failure-touchscreen-offers-extended-warranty/

sammystag

Re: Great

Because the screen blacks out and the audio fails. Camera is on the screen, chimes are audio, defoggers are operated via the touchscreen

Brit accused of spying on 772 people via webcam CCTV software tells court he'd end his life if extradited to US

sammystag

Re: Team America: World Police

The UK doesn't extradite its citizens if they face the death penalty. Having said that I seem to remember May and Javid bending the rules on that