Posts by JamesTGrant

Microsoft 365 brings the shutters down on legacy protocols

Ah explains the Windows Server DHCP borkage. Someone has been a rummaging!

As RHEL clones hit version 10, Rocky and Alma chart diverging paths

Re: Lightspeed feature

I rather suspect at that point this feature may not be as helpful for you as if maybe for others.

I was going to be sarcastic and suggest that your command was too long and should be shortened to df -h but I thought I’d be grown up about it…,

Borrring

Danish department determined to dump Microsoft

Once you plug in your computer and turn it on, you’re a power user.

Hope that clears that up.

Researchers claim spoof-proof random number generator breakthrough

I like the video camera pointing at a wall of lava lamps number generator. Seems a lot easier than a quantum computer - I could even put the shelves up myself!!

Dem senators pen stern letter urging Noem to reinstate cyber review board

Oh that nice lady? The one with the puppy who doesn’t know what Habeas corpus is?

‘Brightest and the best’

Microsoft dumps AI into Notepad as 'Copilot all the things' mania takes hold in Redmond

Re: text editor

My guess is that as soon as you try and open an enormous multi-line text file, it will fall over in a heap as copilot tries to scrape all the information in the gigabyte txt file

Windows reports two CPU speeds because one would be too simple

I dropped my CPU, it cut my leg and landed on my foot. Two megahurtz

Good luck to Atos' 7th CEO and its latest biz transformation

They mentioned internal cross charging. That’s an enormous effort, which frustrates everyone, makes getting things done slower and brings no money in to the business. It’s corporate navel gazing.

DOGE worker's old creds found exposed in infostealer malware dumps

Re: "Whatever you think you've done, seriously get it checked by experts"

Can’t remember who said it but;

Life is the worst teacher, it gives the exam before the lesson.

Sudo-rs make me a sandwich, hold the buffer overflows

Let’s split the difference - it’s either assembly or BASH.

Makes me happy == perfect for everyone.

Re: Hundreds?

Whoosh

Users find RISE with SAP service levels below industry standard

SAP make loads of money by selling an expensive software hydra to businesses who become totally dependent on it, and then sell support at a markup that’d make you weep. Then companies half arse the internal-facing UX and integrations to pinch pennies and ‘save time’ which makes the staff hate it, and resent their employer.

Everyone knows this because it’s been obvious for 15 years, but companies still ‘jump in’. I guess sclerotic companies have significant inertia.

'I see you're running a local LLM. Would you like some help with that?'

I initially read that as ‘would you like me to uninstall yourself, and then do it.’ Pretty dark…

I misread it as I was squinting because I was eating salty crisps and rubbed my eye - something an AI will never experience.

Nvidia boss gets 45% pay bump, but is the billionaire happy?

Wouldn’t it be nice if the CEO pay rise was pegged to the minimum raise of the staff… he’d still get an INSANE raise.

Citrix finds new use for virtualization: Avoiding PC price hikes caused by tariffs

‘Boot storms’ stopped reading there - total nonsense.

Disney Slack attack wasn't Russian protesters, just a Cali dude with malware

Re: Note to a Hack

Although ‘an ACKing group’ would be a punderful name for a group, regardless of hat colour.

OpenAI pulls plug on ChatGPT smarmbot that praised user for ditching psychiatric meds

Yes, after the fifth or sixth iteration of a (throwaway) BASH script, with obvious problems with error handling and fragile assumptions a plenty, ChatGPT was using words like ‘this is great, clear and production ready, really great job’. Every time I pointed out a problem it would proclaim ‘great spot’.

Eventually I told it that I’d be the judge of whether or not it was good enough for the task in hand and to stop making such effusive comments, or suggesting it was ‘production ready’ and be more professional in tone. And it did, for a few days till it forgot again.

Brewhaha: Turns out machines can't replace people, Starbucks finds

I tried the Blank Coffee at St Paul’s a couple of weeks ago. Never heard of it before. You wouldn’t know that it’s all automated, still people behind the counter, taking orders, moving cups and pressing buttons. I waited outside and could see ‘over the shoulder’ of the counter and realised that even the milk steamer was totally automated.

Nice coffee, nice little environment. Not soulless, unlike Starbucks…

Trump’s 145% tariffs could KO tabletop game makers, other small biz, lawsuit claims

Is there anything about IT or tech in this article?

(I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment in this article but it’s not really the sort of article that I would like to see here as there’s no tech or IT

related component, nor anything that isn’t covered elsewhere at least as well.)

Devs sound alarm after Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks

Re: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

Visual Studio is really great once you’ve set it up and you’re working on the same project and codebase and language (and language version) all the time. Back in the day it was like trying the thread a needle with loads of DLL options and very similar sounding options which all needed to be exactly correct. Maybe it’s better now, but I still fear it! Once you have it set up and it compiles and the stack tracing works you are winning, but it’s a fiddly process. Then switching to a different codebase with different language and different compilers, it’s a ball ache.

VSCode approaches this differently and in my opinion, is much easier and quicker to load up different languages, interpreters, linters, etc within the same project.

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

Re: We had an award

All time dilated into the longest, shortest time. The ‘Oh-no-second’

Using perl to parse XML - and there was an error in the parsing logic? Shocking.

Good just the unit tests caught it…

Oh.

Raw Deel: Corporate spy admits role in espionage at HR software biz Rippling

5000Euro per month, you gotta pay taxes on that otherwise that’ll get hard to move about and you’ll be busted anyway. Took 6months to fall to pieces. The dude ruined his life and disrupted his family for somewhere between £25k- £12,500 and felt the need to relocate his family to Dubai to escape the repercussions.

Imagine someone offering you a Hyundai i10 and the deal was you get the car if you ruin your life.

Seems like he thought he could keep the scam going and ‘just make a little extra on the side’ without really thinking about the actual risk/reward ratio.

Intel's latest CEO Lip Bu Tan: 'You deserve better'

Start ups have people who know what and why…

One of reasons large corporations can’t quickly become like a startup is the internal structures and commitments each parts of the business makes to each other part of the business. Eventually those interactions make the company incredibly slow to actually do anything meaningfully different from what it did the day/week before. The layers between the tech layer and CEO are a very time consuming job and becomes filled with people focusing on that, and those people don’t know much about the tech. The people who do know about technology and science are pressured into delivering and never collaborate on big vision ideas because they’re being held to the coal face and have no latitude, and are effectively discouraged from agitating for any change or pressing up with ideas. So the tech people are at the very bottom of the heap (pun intended!), can’t really innovate with each other, and have no way into the management layer. Even if you did elevate the good tech brains into the decision making layer, there probably aren’t enough of them at the doing the tech layer anyway. Also, by now, anyone with energy who is driven to do a new thing (and capable) will not be working there - they’ll be doing it elsewhere.

If you want the company to do different things, in different ways, you probably need different decisions being made, and that needs the people making decisions to hold either different knowledge or change their methodologies. Having the discipline to get this to happen in a huge corporation requires a lot of ‘slack in the system’ as, in the short term people don’t know how to change, and doing a new thing is much slower than continuing with the status quo.

Start ups generally have people who know what the company makes inside out, what the vision is and an idea of how to get there, at every decision making layer, what the impact of business and technical choices are on the wider company and have the latitude to disappoint people if they see a bigger prize they’d rather pursue.

‘Spin outs’ is about as good as I think large corporations do when developing new ideas (tech/products/processes).

It’s incredibly rare for a huge corporation to change and thrive.

So, big change at Intel will either be fast and catastrophic, or glacial and may take longer than they have left before sliding into irrelevance.

Linus Torvalds forgot to release Linux 6.14 for a whole day

Every day I get paid whilst developing on Linux, for things running Linux, and doing dev using git.

The man is a genuine living legend.

Tesla Cybertruck recall #8: Exterior trim peels itself off, again

Hey look at this crazy concept!’

‘Cool - ship it’

‘But this is just a prototype’

‘Does it drive?’

‘Yeah, it’s a working prototype’

‘Then it’s finished, ship it’

‘Okayyy’

IBM boss Arvind Krishna pockets 23% pay rise to $25M

Re: But not much pension?

5% interest of 25million. Pretty sure he’ll manage on 1.25million - on this year’s take alone.

The difference between the C suite take and the average is a disgrace.

At the start of the year, assuming a 9 to 5 working day, he’s made as much on day one by just after lunch as the average employee makes in the whole year.

MINJA sneak attack poisons AI models for other chatbot users

Mmm if only there was a way to query a dataset in a way where many clients could query a dataset using a suitable abstraction without polluting the data…

Fund my startup?

Run DeepSeek R1 on an Apple M3 Ultra Mac Studio? Sure, it'll just cost you $9,499-plus

Re: Can it run Windows?

Crysis though?

Wanna save Intel? Fire the board, bring back Pat, ex-CEO Craig Barrett says

Intel fell out of the DOW industrial average. That causes enormous volatility in its ability to manage cash flow, makes issuing company bonds very difficult/far more expensive and causes large funds to sell stock which sinks the share price even more. Even if Mr Pat was to totally right about the long term technology strategy, ‘allowing’ that to happen on your watch as CEO is cause for the board to oust you - however you look at it short to mid term ‘shareholder value’ was absolutely dented by that. (Share price 67% lower now than it was 5years ago)

It might be a crappy capitalistic system, but it’s the rules he was playing by - sadly, it seems that on one there has a 20year/100year vision for Intel.

How the collapse of local cloud provider caused biz continuity issues in UK government

Re: If I ran UK Gov IT

One wonders if it’s knowable how many cores, network cost, storage etc the U.K. gov has in AWS in total. I’ll bet I’d be amazed!!

HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'

Re: Irate customers

I wonder if it’s possible to make an entire shelf out of Bondo mixed with sawdust…

Lloyds Bank reviews tech and engineering personnel in reorg

Well - they only made 3.7billion quid in profit so they better get rid of those people who support and evolve the actual guts of the business - you know, the things on which EVERYTHING in the business depends.

Larry Ellison wants to put all America's data, including DNA, in one big Oracle system for AI to study

Billionaire database mogul wants government to store all data in their database?

I can believe it.

Sri Lanka goes bananas after monkey unplugs nation

Re: Scepticism

And time for a new monkey

New boss for Roscosmos as Yury Borisov binned

Re: I miss Rogo. At least he had some balls!* /s

Lordy - you’re like a more predictable Voice of Truth (Russia version). Be your own person - find some truth and beauty. A nationality doesn’t have to define you - you’re a cosmic being, free your mind. Wherever you are - I wish you well.

'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama

You can enforce a dress code that says ‘yellow flip flops only’ - it’s a non-immutable characteristic.

You can’t legally enforce a dress code that says ‘no black hair’ - it’s an immutable characteristic.

A preference for C or Rust is about as racist as a ‘no yellow flip flops’ prejudice.

UK Home Office silent on alleged Apple backdoor order

Re: Human Right

You win today’s Internet. Very good!!

Dems want answers on national security risks posed by hiring freeze, DOGE probes

Oh El Reg - you’ve squeezed in the smallest tech angle. But another ‘Trump/Musk trashing the US government’ article? There’s LOADS of tech stuff happening, let’s have some tech or IT articles?

DOGE latest: Citrix supremo has 'read-only' access to US Treasury payment system

Mmm - I’m assuming that the onboarding process to the infrastructure layer is convoluted and involves VPN and SSH keys and GPG signing and loads of domain knowledge to actually get to anything, or make sense of anything. I’m guessing that these folk are not properly getting an onboarding and I’m guessing they don’t know how to access anything nor what the infra is, nor how any of it hangs together. Certainly not in a week. So - what’s really happening here in IT land? What’s the IT angle?

Workday erases 8.5% of workforce because of ... AI

Mmm - are they really saying ‘we can’t make any more money from the work we could get these people to do now that they are freed up to do it’ or is it a cynical sup to shareholders who hate normal people having jobs and companies making a reasonable profit. Or is it the C suite who want to

make more money for themselves with out putting in effort to actually get the people they have to do useful things and/or by knobbling the company in a way that will only show up in 2 to 3 years?

Oracle starts laying mines in JavaScript trademark battle

What’s in a name?

Given that they are two totally different things and two totally different nouns, how is Oracle still pursuing this? If I launched ‘bonkers’ and someone else launched ‘bonkersText’ would I complain? No - it’s a different noun. No one shorthands ‘JavaScript’ as ‘Java’ because that’s not what it is. They shorten it to ‘js’, coz it isn’t Java.

Abandoned AWS S3 buckets can be reused in supply-chain attacks that would make SolarWinds look 'insignificant'

Re: What!

Yes - not namespaced. Name and name alone. The S3 client API provides a way to test ’expected bucket owner’ but in the same way you can just download warez from a URL if you’re insane, you don’t need to do any authentication or province checking if you don’t want to. It’s interesting but it’s no different from including a download URL with no auth or sanity checks.

White House asks millions of govt workers if they would be so kind as to fork right off

So 2million people all hit the job market at about the same time. This is the sociopath billionaire’s playbook. - drive down wages by flooding the job market.

Will it make government services better or worse? Worse - obviously. For a long time. This is over 2/3rds of the entire civilian federal workforce. It’d be chaos.

I just don’t understand why the current US government Republican executive branch seem to actually hate their electorate and seem to want to (and are) doing things to make life worse for normal people. I mean - they could decide that it’s fun to make people’s lives better and work at doing that instead. They’d still be bajillionaires.

Guess who left a database wide open, exposing chat logs, API keys, and more? Yup, DeepSeek

Re: Amateur hour at Clickhouse

nOauth : enabled

A good kind of disorder: Boffins boost capacitor tech by disturbing dipoles

Re: Breakdown?

Anyone with a Sinclair ZX spectrum in the attic either knows this already, or will find out when they next try powering it up…

Why does the UK keep getting beaten up by IT suppliers?

I think this comes down to the corruption of government by the very wealthy.

We could pay gov tech employees a really great wage and have enough of them.

Or we could pay an external company loads of money instead.

To do the job, the external company needs to employ the same number of people on a given project, but you can bet a big margin goes to the corporation and not to the employees pay. So, it’s tax payer’s money being siphoned off to the mega rich (often non-domestic and untaxed) rather than the government money being used to support good jobs in the nation’s economy. That’s how the very rich get richer and the economic middle class gets hollowed out. When the prime minister is the son-in-law of one of the wealthiest people in the world, (Rishi) who advocates workers do 70hour weeks and shouldn’t ask for holidays, it ain’t gonna improve.

Educating our MPs and councillors on how we can better manage the flows of wealth and why ‘trickle down’ really means ‘the rich will own everything and you’ll be financially insecure’ is the best hope we have now I think. Sorry so depressing.

DeepSeek's R1 curiously tells El Reg reader: 'My guidelines are set by OpenAI'

Court room drama

I like the idea that the output of questions to DeepSeek could be used in court, live, in response to questioning from an OpenAI lawyer.

If it says ‘I’m basically an OpenAI product’ then it’s the onus of the defence to explain why the product is crap and it’s answers can’t be trusted - which would be very funny.

UK council selling the farm (and the fire station) to fund ballooning Oracle project

This is outrageous - it’s the government literally stealing wealth from its people. IMO It should be illegal for a government agency to be able to autonomously sell a publicly owned asset to pay a privately owned contract.

Forget growth - how about we stop giving away our collective wealth to billionaire owned corporations (usually not U.K. based).

Someone is slipping a hidden backdoor into Juniper routers across the globe, activated by a magic packet

Re: If it is in memory

I don’t know - but if you turn it off and leave it off then you’re pretty safe. That’ll show ‘em!!