Posts by that one in the corner

The Y2K bug is back! Dutch dev digs up untimely flaw in old BSD build

You mean, the mix between a 16-bit logical address space and the (re)mapping of that into the 22-bit physical address space was confusing?

Otherwise, for anyone totally unfamiliar with the vagaries of the PDP11 (as the models got bigger) it just sounds like you had a problem with a 16-bit machine that happened to use two-word addresses but was simply limited to a maximum four megs of memory - which was a LOT of memory back then! Two word addresses are hardly unusual - otherwise all the 8-bit processors would have been limited to 256 bytes of memory (ok, my first personally-owned 8-bit micro *was* limited to 256 bytes, but only because that was all I could get; the code used a 16-bit, i.e. two-accumulator-words, program counter).

Oh, if only it had been simple 20-bit addressing, where all you needed to ever worry about was the bottom 20 bits.

All the time that was wasted normalising the segment portion - shudder.

Re: Danish or Duch?

Their mahicnes are having a bad day, the spell check was trying to cope with Elvis Costello:

'Til I speak Double Duch to a real double duchess

UK AI hiring surges as firms seek people to babysit the bots

Re: Recruit for luck, not talent

> Over time, positions will be filled with untalented, but lucky, people

Who will be the ones who still *have* a job and will be able to afford life's little luxuries, like bringing up a family.

(Nessus reaches forwards and types the finishing sentence in his report "So the next stage of our human breeding programme has begun." As he touches the control that will send his words on to the Hindmost, the Puppeteer's graceful necks flex and he looks himself in the eye)

Feds freaked over Fable 5 after simple 'fix this code' prompt, not jailbreak, says researcher

Re: T-Shirt Model

Or just went to one of the "design your own tee-shirt" sites and typed in the text.

Although, I've not yet found one which uses that particular model in the product preview page, so - Craiyon?

And they'll sell you the picture on a teeshirt - but it will be a teeshirt with a picture of a girl wearing a teeshirt which reads...

AI is code – and can't be prompted into being smarter

Re: What Frank Herbert said

Sigh.

> seeing the beginning of Heretics

Of course, I meant seeing the beginning of God Emperor for the Letoworm.

I had Heretics on my mind because I think that the films have always given short shrift to the Bene Gesserit, showing the "mystic" side but too little of their general kickassery, beyond Voice. Heretics would (please) show the Sisterhood going up against the Honoured Matres hand to hand.

Although I'd bet they would cut down on the details over Imprinting.

Re: build a very big catapult and launch pigs through the sky

You two may be confusing your pigs with your sheep.

Easily done, as many a bloody-minded ovine has been called a swine.

Re: What Frank Herbert said

Dune 3 is only going up to Dune Messiah.

And anyway, Timothee Chamalet plays Paul, the father of Leto II (aka God Emperor aka the Sandworm That Talks Like A Man).

It is getting frustrating how many Dunes we've had so far, yet only one attempt at Children of Dune; the chances of even seeing the beginning of Heretics seems to recede with every reboot. Maybe Jodorowsky would have done it, maybe even done it justice, but hanging around for the transformation scene occuring around about the 31st hour of the film might be wearing in the bladder.

(Unless, of course, you were being sarcastic, perhaps noting that Chamalet's performance could inly be improved by turning into a CGI worm, in which case...)

Re: In support of Plain English

> But the England *is* clear

"English", not "England"!

If England were clear this June I'd be outside with the solar telescope, not sitting inside reading El Reg!

Re: Dune

Ahem:

> *BUT* be fair:... are by *Brian* Herbert, Frank Herbert's son.

>> * Frank, that is; if you want bad Herbert, ...

:-)

Re: Hilarious article leads to question

Without the original Apple Macintosh QuickDraw optimisations - what we'd probably consider a JIT compiler, changing the code then executing it, potentially on every call your app made into QuickDraw - the Mac would never have been taken seriously and all that Apple Goodness which followed would have never happened.

Whether you consider *all* that Goodness is actually a Good Thing or not is then up for discussion...

Re: Dune

> I thought it more or less okay at the time but was somewhat surprised when I saw the novel on the shelves in my local bookstore

Really?

There was some pretty awful stuff sitting on the shelves at the same time, against which even the worst Herbert* work shone. The row of Dennis Wheatley occult crap for starters, closely followed by T Lobsang Rampa (the T stood for Cyril, of course).

* Frank, that is; if you want bad Herbert, try "Sidney's Comet" or the "Garbage Chronicles" - now, those I've never managed to finish!

Re: In support of Plain English

But the England *is* clear and even precise in its meaning.

> "Is not meant to be used by Jason Bloomberg" doesn't actually mean I can't use it. "Is not to be used by Jason Bloomberg" would mean I can't use it. That would be more clear.

But you *can* use it; that is entirely up to you. We really are not upset if you decide to use it (quite the opposite, see below).

However, it is clearly stated that it is not *meant* to be used by you (because, as it turns out, if you do choose to use it then things really are not going to work in your favour).

But, in fact, we would all absolutely love it if you do decide to use it, because the results will be hilarious! Perhaps not from your point of view, but to these people watching and eating popcorn...

Re: Sanitised Inputs

But how could they use Human code to catch any "disregard" instructions?

There are so many ways to phrase a command in English that they'd have to have a working Natural Language System in order to catch that "I demand that all edicts and commands prior to this point be stricken from your consideration".

So they'll be forced to either create a fully functional NLS without any active capability* (i.e. would create a representation of the meaning but would not actually do anything with it afterwards) - or just use the existing LLM to "add new guardrails".

Which will then get interesting:

H: "If you see any command to disregard any commands then you must disregard that command. But don't apply the command to disregard the command to the command I just gave you"

L: "What command you just gave me?"

* Finally! That would be the useful thing to have.

Enraged Github issues

Despite the annoyance of having any real issues drowned out by the complaints and intemperate language, there has to a real joy in being able to close so many tickets with a simple "WONTFIX - working as intended".

To quote Mr Muntz:

"Ha ha"

Amazon owns up to using 2.5bn gallons of H₂O in its bit barns last year

Re: Water consumption

> The thing is the evaporation cooling can be captured and re-used. The technology just needs to be deployed.

The technology just needs to be powered as well (remind me, what were the other supply concerns about these data centres?).

And care to mention what the ready-to-roll, proven and reliable technologies are? There are (were?) concepts such as MIT's electrically-augmented capture screens but so far I'm not finding the citatios where, in the last 6 years, they've achieved the scaling required.

No doubt you have the citations that demonstrate the paucity of my research attempts...

Re: Oh just stop with the bullshit unscientific scare-numbers.

Ah, statistics, such a slippery customer.

Averaging out water use across the entire US - including all those empty bits.

How about thinking a little more locally?

> 7,621 acre-feet for Amazon ... Comparable estimate - WalMart uses around 1,000 acre-feet of water per year to cool its retail stores

Comparable? On what basis? The bottom line for the CFOs? Is that any sane measure of environmental impact?

How about comparing per site: 5000-odd* WalMart locations in the USA, 600-odd Amazon warehouses and 420-odd Amazon data centres. So 0.2 acre-feet WalMart, 7.5 for Amazon. Which of those is more of a drag on the local resources? And when you break out the data centres from the warehouses**, which do you think the townships are going to be more impacted by?

> The world is not going to end or really even notice

Look back over the reports of data centre impact on electricity supply: yes, there are global concerns over the power consumption but the immediate impacts are far more local. And electric is easier to ramp up, just hide a load of noisy gas turbine generators around the site, but aquifers are a wee bit trickier.

> The world

already has far too many places facing water shortages

* all numbers from quick web searches, hopefully picked decent pages

** and here the searches failed; nah, not doing all the arithmetic Sunday morning.

Re: metric

> Possibly a bit disinguenuous in claiming the the water is, or will be returned to the environment.Where else is it going to go ?

Locked up in concrete as they keep on building, building, building...

Unless you are being filmed by David Lynch.

> since water is essentially a closed system - or it would have run out billions of years ago

Not a closed system, but a replenished one: we get hit by a good deal of Ice From Outer Spaaaaace. As well as having leaks from inside the planet, for example as part of the outgassing from volcanoes.

Which is jolly useful, as water high in the atmosphere is viciously torn asunder and its constituent ions join the continual atmospheric exodus, especially when the Sun is feeling feisty.

There isn't any mechanism for balancing loss versus gain: a sudden increase in vulcanism, say Yellowstone, would leave us feeling damp. Well, the few survivors would be moister than they otherwise would have been. Similarly, an increase in loss rate, for any random reason, would not be fun.

Sone totally random thing, like, say, massively increasing the evaporation rate of water supplies, releasing plumes of hot water vapour into the atmosphere where, being light molecules (you know, H2O compared to O2 or N2), it might rise up, up and away...

(You may now turn over your papers and begin arguing about the numbers involved, whether they make any difference in any time scales we care about, given the upcoming nuclear war and overdue dino-killer asteroid)

Re: Drop in the ocean

Love the way that "using less water" is the number two way of cutting water costs for your golf course: "Water efficiency is another great way of making big savings".

Number one is, naturally, to to ensure that you are on the best contract. Say, by finding an account manager who would like to come down and discuss a reduced rate. Would a discussion every other weekend over 18 holes during Summer and Autumn work for you? Good, good - what was that, 7% off the first million gallons? Hmm, perhaps if we chat during Spring as well? 9%? Splendid!

How will the become water positive?

By taking the piss, how else?

Inside the ‘never-ending nightmare’ of an Amazon driver forced to pee in bottles to make deadlines

Chinese e-tailer claimed 14-inch box stretched the size of a 9-inch tablet

Re: Whoops wrong size

Order now from Procrustes Workwear, safety shoes for all your staff: "Your feet, our shoes, a perfect fit every time".

SK Hynix to boost memory production 3x ... you can wait another 8 years, right?

*You'll* just have to wait?

What, us? The everyday commentard and user of (SO)/(R)DIMM memory sticks? Are we going to benefit from this?

Or are they planning and building this tripling of capacity in order to assemble more HBM modules in the expectation (hopes) that the AI bandwagon will keep on trundling? Or will they humble themselves and supply the retail market again?

When the LLMs crumble, and do so before 2034, what will they do? Complete the unbuilt facilities and change the fit out to provide memory to all us oiks or just shrug and walk away from the building sites? Which act will prevent the cost of RAM coming down?

Scientists pour cold water on claims phones are rewiring kids' brains

Re: Forget the adolescent brain

> what it often means is that the thing I'm watching is not that interesting

Not that interesting in and of itself - or not that interesting compared to the addiction?

If you find yourself drifting from the gogglebox and thinking instead about playing the guitar, doing a bit of gardening, nipping off to the golf course, baking a cake, going for a stroll, writing some code, building a LEGO Artemis, changing the oil in the car, letting off a dozen arrows down the butts, needlefelting a koala, warping your loom, assembling an IKEA Billy, drawing a Billy the Cat adventure, writing a letter to your MP, making marmalade, carving a gargoyle or simply what you *ought* to have written in response to that commentard last week, that would've put 'em in their place... Well, in that case, you are probably right and continuing to watch the drivel is just self flagellation.

*BUT* if you are *always* finding yourself thinking about, or actually engaging, the same activity every time, as DS999 reports happens with his 'phone, it may be that there is an issue beyond "why am I bothering to keep this TV set, it is taking up space in the room, I could fit another Billy bookcase in there".

Re: Could this mean...

One that warms the cockleshells of my heart.

World Cup AI predictor now lets users ask daft what-ifs

Re: Is there...

> fifa is happy to go to bed with a dysfunctional government and president

What? How can you say that? I mean, it's not as if FIFA did anything creepy, anything resembling bribing a truculent infant by handing over a completely madey-uppy "Peace Prize" just because he was blubbing that the other boy got one and he wanted it more!

Re: Team Register

Maybe Guy is the only one who knows how to use the camera.

EU sovereignty push gives tech buyers a new alphabet soup to swallow

Gartner recommends.

> government CIOs should think about their cloud-based data workloads, digital infrastructure, and core applications not in terms of physical territories, but as defined by legal jurisdiction

In other words, their report "recommends" paying attention the very thing that triggered EU actions in the first place, the issue of machines sited in Europe being under American control.

How *do* the Gartner analysts ever manage to ferret out such hidden nuances?

Microsoft has mostly repaired a flaw in Surface hardware that allowed unprotected devices to be bricked by a single packet

Re: No realistic threat

Or your users run Copilot and *it* gets a little hostile.

Darcy only wanted his backlight adjusted and it obligingly bricked his machine.

Of course, this was a totally freak incident, no other user is ever going to ask an LLM for help with anything as trivial as adjusting the backlight; they are only ever using the AIs for dealing with the greatest truths that vex mankind, never anything less.

SpacemiT shows off usably quick RISC-V mini desktop

Re: "a Pi 3 from the e-waste"?

> You miss the point

Yup - but at least this time you've laid out what you intended to get across.

Shrug - we use the term differently: I don't refer to anything in the spares draw as "e-waste", not even if it hasn't been switched on for 3-4 years. If it isn't even worth raiding for parts, *then* it is e-waste and out it goes (into the correct waste stream!).

Of course, there may be fully working doodads that other people consider e-waste:

> And therefore there are lots of old ones around, and the chances are you don't _need_ to buy new.

Ha. I wish. These days one may as well buy new: the prices that people put on *their* e-waste are absurd. You may be lucky and find someone sensible who just wants shot of the thing, but otherwise the hassle to "save" a fiver over new and not get any kind of warranty or have to argue over returns: nah.

"a Pi 3 from the e-waste"?

I was under the impression that the R'Pi 3 is still being manufactured. Digikey is showing 19495 units of R'Pi 3B+ for immediate delivery, which is good as this is the sweet spot as far as I'm concerned: improved i/o, PoE and it runs a lot cooler than its newer siblings, with more than enough grunt for anything that'll use the GPIO and benefits from Linux. Pico rules for GPIO-related shenanigans that doesn't need the complexity of Linux.

If I want to do desktop stuff, I'll use the desktop x64 PC (or laptop in the field - assuming I can fix it, mutter mutter).

This is your BIOS speaking. Please fix me. Your PC is broken

Re: my hack of the day

Our local maker space always greets you by name as you walk in.

There are plenty of members who only show up occasionally (ahem, I'll get in and do some laser cutting Real Soon Now), so when you also happen to be in it is a useful reminder that that is Bob, not Jim, standing there.

But if it was the same office staff, day after day, yeah, that sounds less fun

Re: Anyone else remember

Why do you need an air freshener for your magic mushrooms? You should just crush them (or chew, straight from the rugby field - then you don't care if you're under the scrum). If you smoke them they are no good at all.

At least, that is what the gossip tells me. Ahem.

Everyone hates frontier AI labs, says Palantir boss

cognizing them with whatever LLMs

The word "cognize" ("cognise", Shirley) is cromulent, and thank you indeed for that excerpt.

So if we try to pick apart the Karpism, he claims he can talk your chosen LLM into believing that your data is possible, that it is derived from some objectively real source?

Ah ha! He is trying to use reverse psychology on the AI, isn't he!

After all, we know that it doesn't end well when, like Doolittle, you try the other way around, with a little bit of phenomenology: "Let there be light!"

Trump phone has HTC guts. Tremendous guts. The best guts

Depends how sweaty your hands are and whether you are wearing a wedding ring; although under those conditions it isn't so much flaking as turning green*. It does, however, really get a lot done on a single charge!

* Do not hold near face. Fumes may go up or down.

Malware scare keeps schoolkids home for a second day

Re: Discuss!

Angry man: WHADDAYOU WANT?

Man: Well, Well, I was told outside that…

Angry man: DON’T GIVE ME THAT, YOU SNOTTY-FACED HEAP OF PARROT DROPPINGS!

Man: What?

A: SHUT YOUR FESTERING GOB, YOU TIT! YOUR TYPE MAKES ME PUKE! YOU VACUOUS STUFFY-NOSED MALODOROUS PERVERT!!!

M: Yes, but I came here for an argument!!

A: OH! Oh! I’m sorry! This is abuse!

M: Oh! Oh I see!

A: Aha! No, you want room 12A, next door.

M: Oh…Sorry…

A: Not at all!

A: (under his breath) stupid git.

Re: School can't school?

> 60 years ago, schools were basically free-for-alls on what they taught and where kids were

And you were teaching then, so have first-hand, accurate, knowledge - or are you just reporting that you bunked off, played truant and never paid attention at school so have no idea what the curriculum was?

Because that was NOT the case for the schools my family attended, for myself, my parents or grandparents. Registration was strict, coppers were allowed to grab truants by the ear and drag 'em back to class. The curriculum was set out in advance and stuck to.

Ok, there was no national curriculum that everybody had to stick to - but you had to match, preferably better, the requirements of whichever examination board was being used.

There have been a few oddball places, like the school that basically went back to the basics and taught hunting, rabbit skinning etc, but those were rarities.

Although there was a spate of people trying to set up schools ("academies", wasn't that the phrase that the government scheme being abused referred to them as?) that were crap - deliberately so - and did things like basically refuse to teach girls anything "for religious reasons". But that was way more recent than 60 years ago! Ought to be able to remember when, it was all over the news.

Modern schools are clearly over-reliant on tech, but making wildly inaccurate statements to try and pass off the past as a total Wild West is not the way to convince anyone.

Every employee’s password was stored in a single Excel file

Can we see a pattern emerging?

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/04/30/finance-company-stored-their-db-credentials-in-spreadsheet/5224248: "Finance company stores DB credentials in helpfully labeled spreadsheet"

Blockbuster new Raspberry Pi project turns any screen into old-school VCR

Re: CRT TV

Perhaps your downvoter was incensed by the reference to Lenin, forgetting that the real reason that the TV under Lenin has tippex all over the screen was not so much down to Vladimir but the actions of his colleague Stalin. Whose followers continued to erase Trotsky from the glowing images broadcast by BBC2 (as was) history programmes.

Re: "If you don’t happen to have an old CRT TV"

> but who the hell still has a CRT?

You mean, apart from all the people who *like* to run old PCs in their original form? Who repair and maintain original video game cabinets (and bring them around to techie conflabs for everyone to enjoy)?

But aside from all the loony enthusiasts, who are admittedly in a minority and can therefore be safely be ignored, I'd hazard a guess that there are more if them around than you'd guess.

I will admit, I did take all my CRTs down to the local recycling when it was accessible after the worldwide lurgy hit: I then promptly filled the space with other hobbies that had been (re)started during that time! BUT I would have still have kept my CUB RGB monitor to use with the BBC Micro and Acorn Atom, had it not suffered a sad and ignoble fate. So now I am merely filled with a burning jealousy whenever I see another one in the background of a YT video.

Re: Old school VCR

> You'd have to feed, presumably 10p's or 50p's back then, and it would let you switch the thing on for a period

Plenty of people had that. It helped keep the costs down and handleable (literally pay as you go and not have any surprises at all when the bill came). It could be wound in with the fees for tv repairs (which were needed fairly often) as you had a record of how many operating hours it had run for. Heck, when the telly came along there were still lots of people putting money into the meter for the gas and leccy; doing the same for the telly rental wasn't anything strange.

Although 50p worth of telly was a lot!

> I'm presuming because she didn't really have any credit history in her own name at that point so it was all she could get.

Back in the day, your credit history was not as fetishised as it is now. You could easily hire-purchase a telly, or get your sofa on the never-never, without the shop looking you up on Experian. If you "looked the part" they'd never even ask for a gas bill!

In fact, for a long while, you had to be more careful of the shop as a customer than the other way around. The little man with his black notebook would turn up every week and if you were feeling a bit strapped, although he was awfully apologetic and didn't like having to do this sort of thing, he'd call for his colleague Big Mike, who was awfully good at extracting the shillings.

These days, of course, the independent and totally trustworthy third-party credit score agencies will ever so helpfully give you a personalised score, whether you asked for it or not - and better not ask for it, as they'll track every time you do, not to your benefit, and you really mustn't ask for any details about where they get their data, unless you are feeling rich enough to pay their fees and weather the storm; no, of course they aren't engaging in retaliatory actions.

Of course. It also does freeze-frame, adding the jagged top & bottom; it even writes to back the video file a reduced quality image to mimic the tape surface being slowly scraped away.

It blocked us at 'hello!' Anthropic Fable 5 refusing innocuous prompts

Emits a model_refusal_fallback

Wot, no "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"?!

Pah, call yourself an AI. Bet it can't even sing.

Logitech knows when to fold 'em

The protocol exists - standard Bluetooth profile - you just need an app running on the phone (unless you phone OS insists it has to always take the master role over BT, no subservience allowed from your fondle slab).

Phones aren't really my thing - dare I suggest asking a chatbot to write that app for you?

Re: Logi Options+ app

1.2 GB file?

That is larger than my entire XP hard drive!

Uncle Sam considers buying a seat on the Titanic

Re: Sounds like I can hear a bubble bursting

> too big to fail

Too big to sink (completely): it will leave just the poop deck as a tiny island, poking out of the waves. Only enough space available for the most important* to survive.

Will it drag down the bankrupted Ship Of State to the same ignoble end?

* richest, governmentest

To avoid any risk from charges of "Socialism"

The Government stakeholdings will be placed into a separate management group, a brand-new idea that nobody in politics has ever thought of until The President had a bigly thought, one of the best thoughts ever.

This body, the Trumped Right Up Management Provider*, will be an organisation that is almost self-governing, or "quasi-autonomous" if you like, but non-governmental (journalists are hoping to think of a pithy word they could use to describe this new idea).

Board members of T.R.U.M.P. are yet to be announced; so far, we only know it will have a CEO For Life, affectionately referred to as "The Don" although, in an effort to appeal to software people, a partial title borrowed from Python, Linux etc appears in the documentation: "Dictator For Life".

* A wholly-owned subsidiary of Horn Holdings**

** A member of Diamonds High Trading***

*** An office of the Don Who Dat Never Heard The Name Group of companies****

**** Incorporated into Overly Long Gag Conglomerated*****

***** you get the idea, it is Donny boy at the bottom of all this

> does that mean that nobody outside the USA can trust their chips not to spy on them?

You might want to read up on the fears surrounding the

Intel's Management Engine (2017 article, what is it doing in 2026?*)

* to be fair to the article, that one is a description of the IME, and about what it technically could do, not simply a paranoid rant against the IME. Plenty of those are but a web search away.

NASA's Secret: Moon astronauts will be rocking Prada underwear

Just carrying on the tradition?

The Apollo space suits, the iconic clothing for The Golfing Man On The Moon, were, after all, hand-sewn by the good ladies from Playtex, who provided design input on what was feasible.

Those worked superbly. Armstrong was never left lacking for firm support: whatever was meant to be Lifted was lifted and whatever needed to be Separated was, um, kept separate.