* Posts by xyz

1205 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Dec 2007

Page:

How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes

xyz Silver badge

Re: You expect it to "know" facts?

Is there a "in a nutshell" switch? I nearly fell asleep trying to read all that.

"what is religion?"

"It's when 2 groups who believe in God beat the crap out each other."

:-)

Microsoft license shuffle means Power Apps users could break the bank

xyz Silver badge

Whatever the problem, Sharepoint isn't the solution™

You should make T-shirts. I'd buy one.

FCC ups broadband benchmark speeds, says rural areas still underserved

xyz Silver badge

FFS

FCC, just bite the bullet, get over the whole "it must be an ISP" thing, and rollout Starlink (or whoever) and everyone will be happy. No ISP is going to drag their ass into the bushes for what you are willing to pay.

Teams or whatever chews through around 6GB a day so mobile is no use and mobile is all Wi-Fi calling these days anyway because there are no tower costs.

My "connection" to Starlink is always >300mbps down and 30mbps up, around 30ms latency and 45€ a month and I don't give a fuck which ISP it hooks up to as long as it works.

Developers beware, Microsoft's domain shakeup is coming soon

xyz Silver badge

Stupid.twats.microsoft.com

I.couldnt.give.a.fuck.anymore.about.those.idiots.at.microsoft.com

South Korea goes out on a limb to manage forests with AI, satellites

xyz Silver badge

Sounds daft I know but...

This is all good stuff. Tree counting is the easy bit, the ballbreaker is the satellite soil and light data resolution which is woeful, so probably why you need "AI" to guess the bits in between the sampling points.

Note to ESA (and by extension NASA). Your site says all data is free to everyone and it is but the access method if you are not "one of the club" is from the 1990s. Surely you have a public access API these days rather than the FTP kludge that is on offer.

'Chemical cat' on the loose in Japanese city

xyz Silver badge

Wait a mo....

They have video of a soggy cat leaving the building, but was it a cat that fell into the vat?

Telegram eyes IPO as user numbers close in on 1 billion

xyz Silver badge

I hate the little animated doo-das...

But botfather is the nads (except for the name) and much simpler to code against than WhatsApp.

Network Rail steps back from geofencing over safety fears

xyz Silver badge

These things are not safety certified...

Except in the salesperson's imagination. Management should know this.

Microsoft confirms Russian spies stole source code, accessed internal systems

xyz Silver badge
Holmes

I feel sorry for the hackers...

Think of the nightmare going through all that class inheritance.

UK and US lack regulation to protect space tourists from cosmic ray dangers

xyz Silver badge

Re: Earthly dangers

YET!!

How do you lot feel about Pay or say OK to ads model, asks ICO

xyz Silver badge

You can see the pile on coming...

Get away with this and you'll be entering your CC details on every website or "consenting".

Rapist: pay me or you consent to me fucking you?

Biden's State of the Union included a battle cry against AI mimicry

xyz Silver badge

If America wants to be great again...

Maybe you should train your people in a world adopted measurement system. The amount of American stuff I really liked but HAVEN'T bought online because the measurements are in pounds and inches is huge. Even just put the kgs, cms in brackets, but I'm not wasting my time doing conversions. Sorry.

Trump, who tried kicking TikTok out of the US, says boo to latest ban effort

xyz Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Tik Tok Youth Brigade

Orange Jesus... Love it.

Trump supporters forge AI deepfakes to woo Black voters

xyz Silver badge

Re: Transvestites for Trump

An idea... Why doesn't El Reg do AI rendered Playmobil? I'd love to see the playmobil Trump.

xyz Silver badge

Transvestites for Trump

That's gotta be a picture!

Watchdog calls for more plugs, less monopoly in EV charging network

xyz Silver badge

Meh... Either way

The charging cables will get nicked. Even at a quid a cable at a scrappy, I reckon a team of 4 can bag 1.5K GBP each over an 8 hour shift if they go at it.

Indian tech minister vows to stop Google removing local apps from Play Store

xyz Silver badge

Choke...

Having spent my entire life avoiding people like the plague, the thought of "rent-a-friend" makes me want to puke. I've never understood what the purpose of a "friend" is for a start so I'll be avoiding this rent-a-friend thingy... and this morning I woke up to the news that I've got a follower on some website. For a start, I wouldn't follow me, so God help whoever the "follower" is. Am I supposed to feed it, take it for walkies or what?

Whatever happened to the good old "he kept himself to himself" notion. Where's me axe?

Elon and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad legal week

xyz Silver badge

Re: Get with the program “Elon” ..

I read "get with the pogrom Elon".

AI to fix UK Civil Service's bureaucratic bungling, deputy PM bets

xyz Silver badge
Facepalm

I just don't have the words...

Nope can't think of anything apart from ha ha ha ha ha

Husqvarna ports Doom to a robot lawnmower – not, thankfully, its chainsaws

xyz Silver badge

I'm a Stihl bloke

I have 1 Husqvarna thing and it's shite and I'm pretty sure Husqvarna has been badge engineering for a while now. Anyway, given that both Husqvarna and Stihl seem to have decided that the domestic market is where growth will come from, I presume everything will be app connected, battery powered and probably come with cup holders soon (for your coffee from your Husqvarna or Stihl coffee machine).

Mind you I haven't bought anything Stihl since their designers got new CAD software and everything got made with sexy corners, which is a health and safety hazard when your trying to start a chainsaw on a wet, freezing January morning.

Bought a Makita telescopic pole chainsaw last week and it's the nads.

Meta to build election operations center in Europe to inspect AI content

xyz Silver badge

Poacher turned gamekeeper? Or...

Standard scam strategy... Create a problem and then come up with a solution to get rid of it.

U-Haul tells 67K customers that cyber-crooks drove away with their personal info

xyz Silver badge

I'm just imagining...

All them residents of trailer parks, locked and loaded and waiting for them cyber crook types attacking.

Google Maps leads German tourists to week-long survival saga in Australian swamp

xyz Silver badge

Yes but....

Did it plug a restaurant, a petrol station or an ATM nearbye? I thought that was its advertising job.

Crowning glory of GOV.UK websites updated, sparking frontend upgrades

xyz Silver badge

Re: If they *really* want to improve the experience....

You think that's crap, you should try the Policia Nacional site for foreigners in Spain... You can only book an appointment when the police station is open!! 9-14h and it's shut in the summer for 3 months and you can't go to one outside of where you live.

Italy's military mulling space-based supercomputing cloud

xyz Silver badge

Err...

Maybe they know something we don't, like the Earth becomes toxic soon, or maybe to let everyone think they've put compute in orbit when they've put it in the med, otherwise it's a completely stupid, bonkers idea. And why is a military (ok, it's the Italian military) publically announcing where it's thinking of sticking its command and control capability?

A visa to fill Australia's empty tech jobs is getting more expensive, but maybe better value

xyz Silver badge

I always thought the first question was..

1) Are you white? Yes/no.

If yes go to last question.

n) What sort of house would you like to live in?

:-)

Oxide reimagines private cloud as... a 2,500-pound blade server?

xyz Silver badge

Re: 3000lbs

Note to editors... There are 350 million Americans who know what a pound is and umpteen billion non Americans who don't. Same goes for things like 3/8 of a bushels quart or whatever. I mean, you lot even have gallons that aren't gallons. Stop it please. Metric is not a commie pinko plot to turn American yoof into raging transvestites.

Microsoft 'retires' Azure IoT Central in platform rethink

xyz Silver badge

A "smelling your own shit" scenario

That's been the problem with IoT from day one. What was supposed to be cheap got "cloud" fever (amongst other things) and it all went titsup after that. I keep my IoT stuff as far away from the big boys as poss, until I need to stick the data into an SQL database (my choice) which I get from Hostgator for about 4USD a month. What will really be the gamechanger is when Starlink (or whoever) ties the knot with the mobile 'phone companies and we get wrap 'round mobile signals to send data with.

IMHO obviously.

Microsoft says it'll throw €3.2B at AI ops in Germany

xyz Silver badge

Lesson 1

>>The Windows maker also pledged to help more than 1.2 million workers develop digital skills by the end of 2025.

1) Adopt kneeling position

2) Pucker lips

3) Kiss plastic ass

Roses are red, violets are blue, Opera GX gives Valentine's a gray, rainy hue

xyz Silver badge

While they're at it...

Can the get rid of that bloody football pop up that infests Opera mini every Saturday morning. I'm not talking about the football icon at the bottom of the screen, which you can disable, but that crap POS with the "I'm in" button that you just cannot get rid of?

Venus has a quasi-moon and it's just been named 'Zoozve' for a sweet reason

xyz Silver badge

Geesajobe...

Seriously... There's a bunch of idlers who get paid to sit on The Small Bodies Whatever Group and make up names for space stuff. How much do these losers get paid for this crap (and do they have any openings) ?

Making sense of Microsoft's 'confusing' Copilot functionality carnival

xyz Silver badge

I'm dying my hair ginger...

And buying sandals. Linux here I come! Why the fuck does Notepad need AI?

John Deere tractors get connectivity boost with Starlink deal

xyz Silver badge

Re: "Great for Farmers"

I just read this.. You should too...

https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

Whether to move off Oracle is the $100M+ question for Europe's largest public body

xyz Silver badge

SAP > ORACLE > Fujutsu??

I'm sure BCC can get a good deal on a 2nd hand Horizon system off the Post Office. Fnar fnar.

Rise of deepfake threats means biometric security measures won't be enough

xyz Silver badge

Help!

I've been trying to find these Taylor Swift deepfake hot hot hot images for days and all I get is pictures of some woman's head and a lot of words about how naughty these pictures are...

I can even find pictures of a Forida man in a mankini which is truly disturbing, but no TS fiddly bits.

The internet is disappointing.

UK biometrics boss bows out, bemoaning bureaucratic blunders

xyz Silver badge

0800 Fujitsu

This sounds like a tasty morsel for them to indulge in. Confusion , lack of direction, multiple systems... They could make a killing and no one will ever find out it didn't work.

Windows 12 fan fiction shows how Microsoft might ladle AI into the OS

xyz Silver badge

Note to MS

Yesterday my GF was trying to Teams someone and all she got was screen after screen of "see what's new in Teams" infomercials. She ended up screaming "I'm just wanting to fucking make a call". The day before she was trying to write a document and couldn't without internet access and bellowed "I'm just trying to write a fucking document". She's a C suite and the CTO is a "friend of Linux".

I don't rate highly, MSs chances of survival at her company. INHO, MS your current cloud strategy is shit.

GPS interference now a major flight safety concern for airline industry

xyz Silver badge

Re: Options

Ah the old jokes are the best. I was scanning the comments just hoping to find it.

Musk lashes out at Biden administration over rural broadband

xyz Silver badge

I am confident there are off-grid homes that it is nearly impossible to dig fiber to.

Yup, I live in one. 2kms down a track in a nature reserve. There is no mobile signal, water, gas or electricity or chance that I would even get the necessary permits to install the above. There is brand new sparkly fibre at the head of the track on the main road, but it may as well be on Mars for all the good it does me. So Starlink (>300mbs down and 30mbs up for 45€ a month) and solar for me.

Considering that the price was 100€ a month 18 months ago and has dropped steadily, I can only presume that Starlink is trying to compete on price (eg DiGi is 500mbs fibre + 20gb mobile for 21€pcm but the average price for any provider is around 40€pcm), so that's why Musk is moaning. He doesn't want market competition and especially doesn't want subsidised market competition.

US cities are going to struggle to green up their act by 2050

xyz Silver badge

Mmmmm...

The big answer (IMHO) is to change expectations (and maybe make things a bit more efficient). Everyone is an energy addict these days and maybe they should try to kick the habit.

I'm off grid and use energy when I can and don't when I can't. It's a right PITA but I'll stick with it because it teaches me responsibility.

Examples...

My 20 year old DVD player uses 2 of my normal days of power just watching a film.

My Starlink dish chews great gobs of wattage.

Everything else I've got is very efficient, but it was all made someplace, shipped someplace else and the shipped to me. This has to stop but it won't unless people decide to cut back.

As for the fascist greenshirts.. First against the wall etc in my book.

For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company needed

xyz Silver badge

I hate Notes

I once had to extract a Notes DB to SQL server and then build the users a front end.

According to IBM it was impossible (obviously they'd say that) but it was pretty easy except for the mulitmedia files, but there was an undocumented API call that sorted that out.

The horror was the amount of times Notes (when just using it as a user) would gobble up all the available memory and crash windows (can't remember which version of windows) and is obviously where windows got a rep for dropping its kecks. Notes is ghastly and I'm glad it's been spread apart (like that computer that was responsible for the war before the Kricket wars) so it never again is allowed to reign terror over office staff. These days we have Microsoft for that... The student becomes the master it seems.

Google is changing how search results appear for EU citizens

xyz Silver badge

Google search...

Yeah, that's what it used to do. Now you just get fed personalised crap. Google will be DMA compliant up to its ass but unless you agree to allow Google to give you a good butt fuck, bet pretty much nothing will work.

Sorry, but I'm still pissed because my English device language phone showed me a completely different set of results (useless crap results) from a Spanish device language phone (exactly what I was looking for) for the same effin query.

And dont get me going on about different results for the same query on a different tab.

Mind you, Bing still cant find me and I have a unique name combo.

Google AI chatbot more empathetic than real doctors in tests

xyz Silver badge

I went to a doctor once...

He said I was ill.

I didn't go back as he was too negative.

Microsoft braces for automatic AI takeover with Copilot at Windows startup

xyz Silver badge

HELL F**K NOOOOOOO...

That's about all I can muster. It's bad enough getting my laptop to "start up" without me drinking 3 coffees and smoking 3 ciggies. Now I've got to wait for a cheeky e-chappy to clear its throat. OMG.

The week in weird: Check out the strangest CES tech of 2024

xyz Silver badge

Re: Getting in a Flappie, or not

I'm from the "kill 'em, kill 'em all" brigade. I'd buy one if it came with a guillotine rather than a flap.

:-)

Exploit for under-siege SharePoint vuln reportedly in hands of ransomware crew

xyz Silver badge

Meh...

Good luck to them. Sharepoint is so slow, they'll probably die of old age whilst it loads a page.

I didn't even know it was still a thing until I read tbis. Thought everyone had binned it years ago.

Why Google is waiving egress fees for disgruntled customers ditching GCP

xyz Silver badge

Isnt this...

What happens when you try to move your mobile phone service provider.. You get shunted to a specialist team to try and dissuade you.

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

xyz Silver badge

Re: Corruption

Any large website has to cope with "thousands of terminals", all different, all configured by someone else and everybody just accepts that fact and gets on with it. And don't give me any crap about security either. Fujitsu et al are just repeddling the 1990s to dumb management fucks and coining it.

Data regulator fines HelloFresh £140K for sending 80M+ spams

xyz Silver badge

HelloFresh + spam

There's a joke in there someplace surely.

Trump-era rules reversed on treating gig workers as contractors

xyz Silver badge

Tricky one...

On the one hand you have businesses wanting to maximise their returns by using "gig workers" .

On the other hand you have the govt wanting to maximise its slice of cheese by reclassifying "gig workers" as employees.

And in the middle of all this is the "gig worker" just trying to feed its family.

Basically, you have 2 groups, each trying to suck your blood for their benefit.

For me, I prefer to have my blood sucked for a financial return than sucked to keep some public servant's pension pot happy.

Page: