* Posts by Gordon 10

3867 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2009

Oracle AI buzz means Larry Ellison's worth $15B more today

Gordon 10

How stupid are these shareholders and traders?

I can only assume its part of a pump and dump scheme.

Oracle are nowhere on the AI radar.

Justice Dept reportedly starts criminal probe into Boeing door bolt incident

Gordon 10
Joke

Those Air Batik pilots did things in the wrong order

They should have put Jakarta before the snores.

Reddit wants to raise $748M with IPO, sets value at $6.4B... and it has yet to turn a profit

Gordon 10
WTF?

Is there anyone in El Reg land

...that thinks Reddit is worth more than 50p and a bag of marbles?

Copilot pane as annoying as Clippy may pop up in Windows 11

Gordon 10

Not sure it will be that intrusive

This behaviour is already present in Edge Copilot on the icon in the top right.

Its a "Hover and Pause" action like a tooltip rather than an instant reaction. It needs deliberate intent.

Underwater cables in Red Sea damaged months after Houthis 'threatened' to do just that

Gordon 10
Thumb Up

Re: Why do they need a submarine?

I came here to say the same thing. Pretty much any threat actor has the wherewithal to hire or steal a big enough boat to drag an anchor around the seabed.

Why is this a surprise?

Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women

Gordon 10

Re: Wouldn't suprise me

I think you're a little too negative on this one - at least as far as UK law goes.

The announcement (if reported accurately) is a blanket policy and open to huge challenges, and potential joint actions by multiple 10's of employee's.

There is zero chance Dell will try to blanket enforce this in the UK.

Expect them to quietly back out and say it was US only.

But don't be surprised to hear of huge payouts by Compromise agreements to keep everything on the down-low.

Oracle is hiring two new teams to build its cloud faster and stronger

Gordon 10

OCI is a joke

Its basically a load of oracle hardware and some virtualisation plus a UI thats designed to fool people into thinking they can compete with the hyperscalers.

You can throw as much dev at it as you like but its just lipstick on a pig.

Lukewarm reception for Microsoft's Copilot Pro amid performance, cost grumbles

Gordon 10

Re: Open source version

Oh Really? Care to name it?

Gordon 10
WTF?

Re: Classic MS are making people put up something they don't want nor need yet

Rammed Computers into everybodies hands..... this is a wind up right?

Gordon 10

Early Pro Adopter here

Mostly doesnt work for me.

Gordon 10

Re: Copilot ... sucking up resources and spying on everything you're doing to use Copilot

It doesn't spy on anything you are doing. Yes it has some access by default but its not (currently at least) doing stuff with that access unless you explicitly tell it to.

If you're worried about that you need to spend a lot more time working about MS Graph. Thats the monitoring-ware.

Case in point - look at the default Edge Home page OR if you want real nightmares look at MS Delve. It basically can tell you what your boss had for breakfast.

The Post Office systems scandal demands a critical response

Gordon 10

One Correction - private prosecutions

The post office is not unique in using Private Prosecutions and has no special powers to do so, (in spite of its origin as being one of the earliest Investigations function.

The difference for the PO was that the Legal system was *accustomed* to them doing so *at scale*, some of the usual scepticism that maybe another private company would get was missing.

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

Gordon 10

This isnt really news is it?

Vehicles of all descriptions have issues with extreme cold, the different Joe Schmo's diesel isnt newsworthy.

Im all for a bit of Musk slagging but this one seems kinda pointless.

Gordon 10

WTAF does power production to do with EV's charging?

Are you drunk?

Infosys co-founder doubles down on call for 70-hour work weeks

Gordon 10

Alternative view. Do your contracted hours and not a cent more. when the wheels of capitalism come to crush you bleeding yourself dry for the company wont save you. Your company wont remember you after you have gone. Your family probably will - if you've been present.

DARPA's air-steered X-65 jet heads into production with goal of flying by 2025

Gordon 10
WTF?

Re: What could go wrong...

"* Short landing and take off requires heavy use of flaps."

No shit sherlock. Fancy highly paid aeronautic engineers not solving that one up front before some random on the internet points it out......

Sam Altman set to rejoin OpenAI as CEO – seemingly with Microsoft's blessing

Gordon 10
FAIL

Re: Satya?

Eh? Are you drunk?

Considering he was sideswiped too he's not put a foot wrong. His decision at every point has been to protect MS's investment in Altman and his inner circle who are the geese laying the golden eggs.

The El Reg article on this from yesterday has aged rather badly. Lol.

MOVEit victim count latest: 2.6K+ orgs hit, 77M+ people's data stolen

Gordon 10

Re: What?

Weird response dude. I can only assume you don't keep up with your professional obligations? You must have been hiding under a rock all year.

SpaceX celebrates Starship launch as a success – even with the explosion

Gordon 10
Facepalm

Re: I can't help but feel....

Your first comment was a bust - but keep digging.

Not a Musk fan but SpaceX payloads have some of the lowest insurance costs around because it's the most reliable launch platform in existence.

Its exactly how deep SpaceX's pockets are. SpaceX expect and have planned for the first few launches to be underwritten by themselves, and will be offering hugely discounted payload fees.

Why do you think he launched the Roadster on Falcon Heavy?

Duh.

Tesla Cybertruck no-resale clause vanishes faster than a Model S in Ludicrous Mode

Gordon 10

Why on earth would you want one.

Its Musk's version of the Homer or the Edsel.

Apple exec defends 8GB $1,599 MacBook Pro, claims it's like 16GB in a PC

Gordon 10

You are confusing your geeky needs with general use cases - they are not the same thing.

You *want* 16Gb coz you are willy waving. Coz bigger in better innit. Do you own an SUV?

I agree with the general tone of the article but the reality is there are tons of use cases where 8Gb is plenty.

Even on Windows - ironically have at 2012 MBA with 4Gb comfortably running basic browser and office tasks using Win10 Bootcamp.

Gordon 10

Re: I was gonna say...

On what planet are you on where you are running a big DB on a laptop? The 90's called and want their shonky development methodologies back.

Snowflake puts LLMs in the hands of SQL and Python coders

Gordon 10

Alex Savage doesnt seem to have a clue what he is talking about

Unless you're a tier one enterprise who can piss money and pride up the wall developing your own LLM's the only game in town are those LLM's from the hyperscalers, for which re-training and fine tuning are very limited options anyway. With a bit of prompt engineering they are pretty good - certainly for the general stuff you're likely to throw at them via Snowflake.

The actually cost of running the hyperscalars LLM's are buttons too - only the artificial price points set by the hyperscalars is a consideration. Anything from with GPT3.5Turbo is peanuts, GPT4 is still expensive but expect that to come down as the competition builds....

(Theres some interesting low resource LLM's emerging on places like Hugging Face, but Consumer grade LLM's from the hyperscalers is mostly where its going to be at unless you've got a big Data Science team struggling to stay relevant.).

Batterygate bound for Blighty as UK court approves billion-dollar Apple compensation case

Gordon 10

Re: make it hurt

Why should it have to hurt? Leaving aside the fact that you probably wrote this out of Apple spite - what harm was done by this action, and therefore what damages are due?

Gordon 10
WTF?

Its a weird one

This case has always struck me as a bit strange.

As others have pointed out showing that apple actually profited from this action is counterintuitive as they lost out on upgrades and similar. No-one has shown or proven any nefariousness on Apples part merely what appears to have been a poorly communicated effort to improve battery life and stability.

I dont see how ANY sane judge could rule that people have suffered a financial loss from Apples activities, and therefore are due damages. Even if they have suffered a loss there is no way to show its been anything but trivial.

This stinks of a monetisation play by greedy lawyers rather than any pro-active consumer led action.

Qualcomm claims its X Elite PC parts can go toe-to-toe with Apple, Intel

Gordon 10

Re: Well that's lovely...

But at least 6-9 months behind the curve now the M3 is out, more realistically 2 years.

Qualcomm also have a mountain to climb in terms of volume and brand recognition.

Apple lifts the sheet on a trio of 'scary fast' M3 SoCs built on a 3nm process

Gordon 10

Re: Apple’s Problem?

Thing is Apples refresh cycle has never really changed. Its more like 5 years on the corporate side than the WinTel 3. So Apple is building M3's for the last of the Intel Mac generations.

Gordon 10

Re: Linux is twice as efficient in memory than windows I've found.

Screw Zorin (with apologies).

Open Core Legacy Patcher. My 2011 iMac is now running Monterey with Sonoma supported as well.

Gordon 10

Re: Not hard to see why Apple aren't fans of TheReg with a wildly biased article like this.

Your last line is BS.

In 2018 the cheapest MPB 13" with touchbar was $1800 a year before that the *real* budget 128Gb non-touch model was $1300.

Today - the cheapest MPB 14" M3 is $1700

13" 2013 MBA base price - $1099

13.6" M2 MBA base price $1199.

So Apple prices have been pretty stable, they've always commanded a premium but there is little evidence to show that that the premium has increased with the M series processors.

Gordon 10
Trollface

Re: We need a new metric

Funny. My 2013 MBA died last week. My 2012 MBA is still running, My 2011 Imac is still running (and that had a bad rep for the graphics card).

Back under your bridge?

Former IBM Canada worker wins six-figure payout for wrongful dismissal

Gordon 10

Re: Behind every mean termination

Years back a company I worked for did this. Shut down the whole office. HR had to sack everybody whilst also sacking themselves about a week later.

TBF to them they did a really good job of being human about it. About the only time I had respect for them.

Brit competition regulator will make or break Vodafone and Three union

Gordon 10

100% No

We're quite fine with the existing Quadruple monopoly. There is no justification for going down to 3 it will hurt the consumer.

Apple antique aficionados can boot to the future with OpenCore Legacy Patcher

Gordon 10

Re: Why bother?

Windows is pretty much a non-runner without bootcamp - and each MacOS version has different Bootcamp drivers.

Elon Musk's ambitions for Starship soar high while reality waits on launchpad

Gordon 10

Re: At some point...

To be absolutely fair to his Muskiness (if I must) SpaceX has the best non-explody rocket record in the business.

They have a similar % success rate for *landing" rockets (~95%) as Ariane does for launching them. Gobsmacking really.

UK splashes £4B to dive into next-gen nuclear submarines

Gordon 10

Re: Continuity of workload

We love pork

We love pork

We love pork

Oracle at Europe's largest council didn't foresee bankruptcy

Gordon 10
IT Angle

Something iffy here

Apart from the fact that you never, ever, ever customise these monolith POS ERP systems, there is no way Oracle doesn't have a way to allocate cash across accounts. I know of 3 from our Oracle implementation and I have kept as far away as humanly possible from it, someone with product knowledge would know more.

Its shit, but its not that shit.

Whats the betting the big 3 (EY, PWC, KPMG) have done the majority of the cash hoovering that took it to £100m?

Lightning struck: Apple switches to USB-C for iPhone 15 lineup

Gordon 10

The wire is still useful for fastest charging rates.

USB-C should offer an uplift over lightning. 30W->35W has been rumoured with the correct charger. (eg a MBP USB-PD one for example)

Gordon 10

Re: Thank God for fast forward..

Bear in mind that the iPad has been a development test bed for USB-C/TB tech for several years now. Apple knew this day was coming - the only thing stopping them was milking the lightning cable royalties for all the were worth.

Northern Ireland's top cop quits after security breach, disciplinary controversy

Gordon 10

Weird linking the resignation to the data breach. That was a clear case of incompetence on the part of the person who prepared the spreadsheet. Its literally their job. Dont see it as a resigning matter for the big boss, unless until the Inquiry has signifiant findings.

I do wonder what else has been bubbling away apart from the Disciplining officers thing,

Friendly AI chatbots will be designing bioweapons for criminals 'within years'

Gordon 10

In other news centrifuges will help us create bioweapons.

Its almost as if its another tool.....

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

Gordon 10

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

Thats a pretty flawed argument. Any Aliens with the technology to visit Earth, must by definition be at least 50 years ahead of us minimum, if not hundreds or thousands.

The level of automation AND more importantly the cost of that automation would be buttons to them.

Therefore is no technological reason they would need human slaves, they would WANT to keep slaves for a reason other than the cost of technology - ideological or religious AND be culturally blind enough to accept the risk of a slave uprising using their technology against them. they'd have to be 100% sure that their technology was unusable in any shape or form by us.

Thames Water to datacenters: Cut water use or we will

Gordon 10

6-12 months!

TETRA radio comms used by emergency heroes easily cracked, say experts

Gordon 10
Meh

Meh

Wheres the SO WHAT here?

Who cares?

Whats the exploitation use case?

Funnily enough, AI models must follow privacy law – including right to be forgotten

Gordon 10

Academic bollocks

The principles in GDPR are nearly all qualified including the so called “right to be forgotten” this article seems to skip that key point. There is no universal requirement for a processor to delete your PII.

For a privacy breach to be shown the following has to happen.

Firstly you’ll have to show there is a reasonable probability that a LLM was trained on your PII. (If OpenAI says no what are you gonna do?)

Secondly you’ll have to show it retains that information. ( can you show the LLM has retained memory that reliably returns your PII)

Thirdly all the way OpenAI or whomever will be throwing legitimate use and other justifications around like confetti.

I can’t see this working anywhere except perhaps Germany.

Fourthly if you seriously want to go after a LLM producer you’ll have far more luck down an Automated processing angle…

Databricks puts cards on the table format as Snowflake looks for more players

Gordon 10

Nobody cares

Iceberg, Hudi or some other kind of shizzle. Its all edge case stuff.

If you have mainly Data Science workloads have Databricks, if you have mainly traditional workloads have Snowflake. Even better - leave the DS's in the corner with Databricks whilst the real Enterprise level stuff goes on in Snowflake.

Recipient of Europe's largest ever seed round doesn't even have a product

Gordon 10
Devil

Quick - lets dob them in to the CNIL!

Microsoft keeps quiet amid talk of possible DDoS attack against Azure

Gordon 10

This seems likely

Both my company and Missus O365 went squiffy about this time last week.

Gen Z lingo and search engines: A Millennial Odyssey

Gordon 10

Re: Baseline

Based on my usage of ChatGPT thats not true though. One of the "killer" use cases for it is what I call style translation.

You paste in a rough draft and then you ask ChatGPT to formalise or to "Gen Z"-ise the results are pretty promising.

ITs also a great "inspiration tool" if you are struggling to get started its good for a couple of summary paragraphs.

Of course idiots will use it verbatim, but thats really like using Excel as a calculator - a valid use case but not the tool sweet spot.

Microsoft to move some Teams features to more costly 'Premium' edition

Gordon 10

This is silly MS

We’re re just about to do an evaluation on moving to Teams from Webex.

Given that it’s a massive PITA to move in the first place this may very well tip things back to maintaining the status quo.

Move over, graphene. There's a new super-material in town: Graphullerene

Gordon 10

I also studied under Harry K in the 90’s. No one had a bloody clue what he was warbling about. He was on another plane.