Posts by Dizzy Dwarf

Astronomers find sugar near the creamy center of the Milky Way (no caramel, though)

Re: Tea

Well, something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

As another UK prime minister bites the dust, a contradictory tech legacy remains

Surprised, but the BBC is still showing the football ...

... I'd've thought 24/7 rolling coverage of this non-event would've been a better waste of my licence fee.

The new database world according to Google: Inexact queries and AI in everything

Here's ChapGPT's take¹, "TL;DR - This Krishnamurthy dude is talking bollocks."

_{1 - this is a lie; I don't need an AI to sound like an idiot.}

Microsoft accidentally kills epic Outlook email threads

Top posting

Top posting … maybe they could fix that too.

Re: Testing, testing 1..2..3?

A reply-all to say “Don’t reply all”. And read receipts requested - that is true genius.

ESA boss tires of being dragged around by NASA mood swings

Re: Why an hour

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks.

Why is it taking an hour to enable comments after an article is published?

60% of MD5 password hashes are crackable in under an hour

> That works if you assume salt+password. In that case, you hash (say) salt+letmein, and can immediately identify the 20% of users whose password was letmein.

Yes, but the point of having a salt is that it's different for each user. So you shouldn't be able to find all the letmein passwords in that way.

Yes, they're back now. Guess that's Agile at work.

Plain hashes? or salted-hashes?

(Also, the comment icon is missing from the by-line and at the bottom of the article. ElReg's new layout is horrible)

IBM Cloud evaporates as datacenter loses power

Re: Yo, you're cloud is on fire!

da da daah, da da d'daah, da da da d'da daah

Classic ASCII game NetHack debuts version 5.0 just 11 years after last major release

Probably used C99 rather than C11 because there is wider compiler support.

The Navy's autonomous carrier-based refueling drone has finally flown

Stingray? Looks more like TB2

Britain's atomic brain trust gives itself till 2030 to unpick fusion challenges

... gives itself till 2030 to unpick fusion ...

2030 is only four years away.

Which is not ~20 years.

Physicist reckons two-button calculator can do all elementary math

There's an XKCD for everything ...

Sticky-note security turned gym into hall of '80s horrors

Re: Bike!

I've got a silver machine

Bike

I've got a bike. You can ride it if you like.

It's got a basket, a bell that rings and

Things to make it look good.

I'd give it to you if I could, but I borrowed it.

RAF eyes cheap drone-killer as Typhoon jet tests laser-guided rockets

Re: Cannon

And where the hell was Biggles when you needed him last Saturday?

Want to be the IT Crowd for the BBC? An £800M contract beckons

Supplier will need to look after networks, email, tech support, tools and more – plus find cost savings host the radio 2 breakfast show.

Goodbye, Lunar Gateway: NASA ditches Moon station for Moon base

Re: Late 60's early 70's risks.. vs. now

Are you sure, Sir? It does mean changing the bulb.

Elon Musk wants to build 50 times more chips than the world currently produces, using 'new physics'

No, but the use of AI got him there a week early

PwC will say goodbye to staff who aren't convinced about AI

AI ...

... frequently wrong, but never in doubt.

It's not a binary choice. Independent boffin builds a ternary CPU on an FPGA

Re: Ternary is Perfect ...

Or a Windows dialogue

The gripping hand is an Action Man thing, duh.

In the name of science: Boffins build fart-tracking undies

Re: American fart research.

I guess you're checking your coat for the emergency fresh-air spray? Never leave home without it.

We don't need to count the farts

What humanity really needs is activated charcoal undercrackers.

Ig Nobel Prize flees US for Switzerland after 35 years over safety concerns

Re: America's reputational loss will be long lasting

There was no reason to strike out 'very worst'

Desktop tech sent to prison for an education on strange places to put tattoos

Re: Fire training

The fire extinguisher to there to clear your path to the exit. Not to fight the fire.

6,000 execs struggle to find the AI productivity boom

Just replace all your working magnetic ballast starter buttons with faulty ones. Happy workers; productivity increases. Problem solved.

Windows 11 finally hits right note: MIDI 2.0 support arrives

eBay -->

--> Atari ST

Godot maintainers struggle with 'draining and demoralizing' AI slop submissions

Like having a manager who doesn't know what he's talking about. But with confidence.

BOFH: Loss adjuster discovers liability is a two-way street

Re: Waterproofing your car.

Scotland:

- Summer: when the rain comes down (almost) vertically.

- Winter: when the rain comes down at a minimum of 45 degrees.

- Spring/Autumn: These seasons don't officially exist. Just an extension of winter.

Apple's Creator Studio creates a subscription where free apps used to live

Nobody sane.

LibreOffice does everything I need.

How the GNU C Compiler became the Clippy of cryptography

Well, it's a bad example

Nobody stores a password in a database - you store a salted hash and compare those.

But strcmp is the wrong function to use. A human wrote that to return as soon as the answer is known, which is as soon as a character differs. The optimiser had nothing to so with it.

Also, that would be in glibc, your -O3 is not going to recompile that anyway.

You want a function that has to compare every character. Maybe something that returns how good of a match it was.

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

Is Musk's mega datacenter constellation even feasible?

tl;dr

No.

'Hey! I'm chatting here!' Fugazi answers doom NYC's AI bot

Re: Fugazi?

Vodka intimate, an affair with isolation in a Blackheath cell

Extinguishing the fires in a private hell

...

Challenger at 40: The disaster that changed NASA

Re: It's All Down To The Romans or What Have The Romans Ever Done For Us?

Those person they call the Roman they go the house

Concorde at 50: Twice the speed of sound, twice the economic trouble

Concord was nice

But the XB-70 Valkyrie was way cooler.

Kids learn computer theory with wood, cardboard, and hot glue

https://elite.bbcelite.com

The Roomba failed because it just kind of sucked

I drag my Henry around by his nose.

"Come on R2"

Cornish recycling drive sows confusion among Reg Standards Bureau

I guess the next contentious issue is: is it pronouned scone or scone?

Do you put the jam or the cream on first?

Whitehall rejects £1.8B digital ID price tag – but won't say what it will cost

Parliament debated the petition you signed – “Do not introduce Digital ID cards”

Watch the debate

Read the transcript

Read the research

The petition

Tenstorrent QuietBox tested: A high-performance RISC-V AI workstation trapped in a software blackhole

Can it run Doom?

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

Re: This reminds of the guy that went to the library...

I asked the librarian where the self-help section was.

She said, "That'd be defeating the point".

25 years of meatbags permanently in space on the ISS

I've had this broom for 20 years. It's has had 17 new heads and 14 new handles.

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

Re: Reverend Lionel Preacherbot

Now, an LLM trained exclusively on Adams and Pratchett ... that would be useful.

Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day

Re: Spurious precision warning flag

21% of people instinctively mistrust statistics.

58.2% of people are more likely to believe statistics if they include a decimal point.