Posts by Ken G

US Navy pledges $448 million to test if Palantir is seaworthy

Re: Windows for Warships?

Is that like Minesweeper?

Does it matter?

I get that reducing the scheduling planning from 3 FTE weeks to 10 minutes is an improvement but how long does a submarine take to build and how many are you making?

If the answer is anything like "a few years" and "maybe a dozen" then 3 weeks at the start is a rounding error.

Re: What's Different?

You always have to stay away from Windows!

UK to Europe: The time to counter Russia's information war machine is now

Re: And the ELEPHANT in the room is ..

I don't think there are any actual communists left. The problem is with Russian and American kleptocrats.

Re: Having left the EU in a hissy fit

and your next government, will they be better?

semi-serious question because there is no point in the EU engaging with your current one if you're throwing all the toys out of the pram in 3(?) years. Lining up 27 countries on anything isn't quick.

Re: The usual bullshit

They know that the EU and NATO do not accept members with ongoing conflicts on their territory. Ongoing war suits their aim of holding their neighbours close.

Re: The usual bullshit

Not being US or British, I see all attacks on civilian populations and all genocides as bad and worthy of opposition.

I don't see how someone can support Israel and oppose Russia when both are doing similar things.

I don't see how we can blame Ukrainians fighting back and I don't see how other Europeans can do anything but rearm because we (EU contries) will be next.

Both Putin and Trump want to break up the EU for (perhaps) different reasons. If we want to preserve the European Project then we have to actively defend it.

I personally don't think EU countries are doing all they can to combat hostile countries and hostile companies and need to step up, even if that means doing "bad" things to them.

As humanoid robots enter the mainstream, security pros flag the risk of botnets on legs

For according to the trollish philosopher Plateau, ‘if you want to understan’ an enemy, you gotta walk a mile in his shoes. Den, if he’s still you enemy, at least you’re a mile away and he’s got no shoes.’

Re: What a load of fearmongering CODSWALLOP!

You may be the exception but I'm certainly getting older and so are my friends.

Proxmox delivers its software-defined datacenter contender and VMware escape hatch

Re: What about OpenStack?

I was going to say it didn't do everything but did a quick check, because my knowledge was pre-Covid and it seems to be better. It's still a big beast private cloud and I wouldn't try it on a smaller estate, whereas Proxmox looks like you could build up and environment to match a small ESX cluster.

I'd ask about tools to assist VM porting and also application support but if you're going the OSS route it may not matter.

Datacenters planned for Scotland could end up draining a loch of power

To me, small modular nuclear generators should be near the point of consumption and that isn't Scotland. Why not put them close to the cities of south-east England?

Newly launched civil service pension portal from Capita is crapita, users report

Re: Good grief!

It's not corruption. In fact all the due diligence used to avoid any perception of corruption or unfairness means that it's impossible for a small business to respond. Only companies big enough to keep a lot of trained people on the bench and ready to respond to procurement requests, and only big companies can survive losing one of those contracts. No small business is going to have a few dozen of their best people spend 6 months on a bid with no guarantee of winning it, or to respond to 5 or 6 of those in a row before success.

Re: Good grief!

That's good, isn't it? Your government are trying to reduce net migration.

China's reusable rocket makes it to orbit but fails to stick the landing

Re: Short memories

Launching and delivering payload to orbit counts as a success in my book.

This is rocket science. Restarting an engine to buffer a landing isn't easy.

Well done.

MongoDB talks up its AI chops by talking down PostgreSQL

Re: Scale out early, and scale out often

About to say, maybe the AI is needed to manage the sharding.

BOFH: Forward-facing AI brand experience meets forward-facing combustion risk management

Re: Be prepared!

That's the Swiss Guard.

Where exactly do you expect to see the Swiss Army?

US Navy scuttles Constellation frigate program for being too slow for tomorrow's threats

warfighters

Employed by the Department of War (and paid by anonymous donations from overseas when the US government doesn't).

Not "defence forces" or just "navy". I eagerly await their redesignation as "maritime invasion monkeys".

London councils probe cyber incident as shared IT systems knocked offline

Re: UK Knowledge Sharing

I very much doubt "best practice in recovery" is being shared across Greater London.

Britain plots atomic reboot as datacenter demand surges

it's hard to see how slashing regulations is going to cut down that timeline by much.

First you have to slash the regulations around planning permission and environmental impact, then the ones around safety regulations.

Windscale opened inside 4 years of the decision to build it. Chicago Pile-1 took less than 2 years to build.

Self-destructing thumb drive can brick itself and wipe your secret files away

Is there a RAID array that takes SD cards?

70-hour work weeks no longer enough for Infosys founder, who praises China’s 996 culture

basics for the easily pleased

Are they selling shares in that concept? I can see it taking off.

Re: Outsourcing at scale ..

Which is better (as in, more profitable) if your run an outsourcing company, one experienced and highly paid techie on a 35 hour week or 5 low cost recruits working 70 hours a week?

Magician forgets password to his own hand after RFID chip implant

Re: I'll do you one better: International Association for Cryptologic Research

Thank you, my favourite story of the day and much better than the one in the article.

AI music has finally beaten hat-act humans, but sounds nothing like victory

Sundarts

Letterkenny did it first

UK's Ajax fighting vehicle arrives – years late and still sending crew to hospital

Re: Typical MOD bid scenario

I'm surprised at this, mass production of heavy vehicles (I'm not talking about their systems or weapons) is something that was pretty well ironed out 50-100 years ago.

AI gets more 'meh' as you get to know it better, researchers discover

Re: AI == Divination?

The coin toss is a way of surfacing your own thoughts, in mid air you suddenly know which way you want it to land.

Re: There is a British Standard for tea making

It's an ISO standard, I believe, but not ratified as Ireland insists (correctly) on scalding the pot before putting in the tea.

Trump turnabout sees him re-nominate amateur astronaut Jared Isaacman to run NASA

key word "before"

I'm sure he's been incentivised to contribute enough since to make up for any perceived imbalance.

From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world

Bring out the comfy chair!

Training an LLM on religion seems like the path to rapid heresy generation.

Developer puts Windows 7 on a crash diet, drops it to down to 69 MB

Re: QNX 1.44MB floppy disk demo

Or a mobile OS that was both more secure and nicer to use than Android or iOS?

Robotic lawnmower uses AI to dodge cats, toys

Re: These are much more fun

But without AI how can it hunt cats and toys?

Digital ID is now less about illegal working, more about rummaging through drawers

If it's about convenience

How about tattooing a QR code on people's foreheads?

Then they won't need to worry about having a compatible phone or their battery dying at the wrong time. It can link to the central database and the scanner can compare their biometrics to those on file.

Chatbots parrot Putin's propaganda about the illegal invasion of Ukraine

Re: Malicous query you say?

Obligatory mushroom cloud

IBM Cloud stops signing and seeking new customers for its VMware service

It's IBM, let's pretend that "old" IBM did this, what would you think?

If the IBM we still vaguely remember, the one that invented virtualisation, gave Intel and Microsoft their first big break, even the one that owns Red Hat, announced this, we'd all think they were about to release (and maybe open source) a product that would blow VMWare out of the water. *sigh* A man can dream.

China's CR450 bullet train clocks 453 km/h in pre-service tests

Deutsche Bahn's ICE reached 405 km/h on the Erfurt-Leipzig/Halle line

DB have to go faster to make up for delays.

SpaceX's Starship: Two down, Mons Huygens to climb

If I've learned anything in my career.

Failure is always an option.

But hey, let's give it to Mr Self Driving Cars by 2017 to figure out.

"SpaceX has achieved more in less time"

NASA was founded in 1958. 11 years later they had landed men on the Moon and returned them safely to Earth.

SpaceX was founded in 2002.

X to combat bot problem by showing more info about users

I don't know what a VPM is.

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

Re: 5 year old database?

The plot is ridiculous but the set design, effects and costumes still hold up. Men and women wear essentially the same uniform, they videocall each other from their smartphones, the base and spacecraft look plausible engineering devices. Acting is on a par with mid-70's ITV.

Managers are throwing entry-level workers under the bus in race to adopt AI

AIding productivity

BSI warns that the business world isn't just saving itself money by eliminating jobs for an entire generation of young professionals; it risks creating a generation of jaded, frustrated people, too.

So AI is doing in years what would normally take decades.

Big money is nervous about AI hype, but not ready to call it a bubble

Artificial Artificial Intelligence

I've decided there's a gap in the market for someone who can confidently make shit up and I'm going for it.

At the moment I'm more expensive than Real Artificial Intelligence but, as the GenAI companies try to pay off their investors, I'm confident I will become competitive.

I don't require much power to work and my only backend expense are substances to cause hallucinations, boost my confidence and damage my memory.

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

so it mistakenly became 'County'?

Europe glances Russia's way after Baltic Sea data cables severed

Re: Silly question

I think these cables are definitely being severed by dragging anchors across them, that the ships doing so have many registrations but usually Russian captains and crews and the only question is whether this is accidental or deliberate, and if deliberate whether this is on behalf of Russia or someone else.

Microsoft moves to the uncanny valley with creepy Copilot avatars that stare at you and say your name

Re: Copilot Crippledware

I'm pretty sure there's a cost/quality trade off, what MS is capable of and what it wants to offer to customers isn't the same thing. If this takes off there may be a premium channel offering better bots.

Re: Codependent copilot

Yes, but then you'll get a video call from one of those people and act as if they're the AI.

Britain's policing minister punts facial recog nationwide

Re: How many of those were in error?

And that was just among the pensioners at one pro Palestinian rally.

UK may already be at war with Russia, ex-MI5 head suggests

Re: Spy vs. Spy

But with inspirational leadership.

Windows 95 was too fat to install itself so needed help from the slimmer 3.1

Re: Good times!

Copilot is a user experience...

NASA administrator says US should have ‘village’ on Moon in a decade

Re: Job opening

He's headed to Mars.

Stop runaway AI before it's too late, experts beg the UN

AI “could soon far surpass human capabilities

and escalate risks such as engineered pandemics, widespread disinformation, large-scale manipulation of individuals including children, national and international security concerns, mass unemployment, and systematic human rights violations.”

GenAI isn't going to surpass human capabilities in anything but confident bullshit, and even there I think there a few humans who will maintain their edge.

The problem is thoughtless application, like using it to "identify" criminals, select candidates for jobs or education, qualify benefits applicants etc. It will also, for the next few years, spam the internet with pointless opinion posts and fabricated pornpictures. It's not that good, can't be trusted and can't explain itself. Worse, we can't explain it.