* Posts by Will Godfrey

5893 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Sep 2007

Should leaders place bets on new PCs or generative AI?

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Happy

Bring it on

It might mean I can get a new laptop at a sensible price.

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

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Facepalm

Re: Poor design in my opinion

Don't forget you can't have the speaker cables just lying randomly on the floor. They must be supported by ceramic stand-offs, that coincidentally look exactly like high voltage overhead insulators.

Mars helicopter phones home after 63 days of silence

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Happy

Re: obligatory

... and today' cartoon is definitely the latter type.

Hmmm wonder if Randal reads El Reg.

https://xkcd.com/2797/

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Happy

Re: obligatory

They don't all make me laugh. Some of them cause me to think. They're all somewhat off-the-wall, which is a 'good thing' (TM).

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Unhappy

Re: Ingenuity's initial mission called for just five flights,...

The way things are going, we'll soon be paying 10 times as much for things that don't last as long (in some cases that's already true).

UK government hands CityFibre £318M for rural broadband builds

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Unhappy

Hmmm

BT, CA, V? What kind of choice is that? Aren't they all just Sith clones?

Fujitsu admits it fluffed the fix for Japan’s flaky ID card scheme

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Mushroom

Re: "avoid working with local tech giants"

That's the first thing that comes to mind whenever I see the name. I'm surprised they haven't changed it to hide their past.

Linux Mint cuts slice of 'Victoria' as 21.2 beta lands with dash of fresh Cinnamon

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Linux

Re: Vertical taskbars can grow on you

This link should make it obvious :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI5JkY7Ahxo

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Linux

Re: Vertical taskbars can grow on you

For most desktop work I'd agree with you, but for audio work, width is more valuable than height.

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FAIL

Hate UIs that don't have title bars

Our software uses these to tell the user exactly where they are in the program at a glance - including which instance is running

It's time to mark six decades of computer networking

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Angel

Re: Now forgotten

I still have a sort of nostalgic fondness for RS232 - simpler times!

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Re: Wonder....

That was indeed the net result

Comms watchdog to probe errors that left Brits unable to make emergency calls

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Unhappy

Spooky

LESSONS will be LEARNED

-V-

LIVES will be LOST

Google uses India to test ‘deliver to the house near the post office’ feature

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Unhappy

Re: Directions

There are also the road signs placed on short posts or a low wall that you can only see as you pass the turning.

If AI drives humans to extinction, it'll be our fault

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Unhappy

Re: Current AI = Automated Stereotyping

Can't remember the tile now, but way back in the 1960s I read a short story based on that premise.

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Unhappy

Re: Too many trees, can't see any forest

There is now!

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Meh

Re: A Future Surprise for Current Running Realities, the Rise of Virtual AIMachines .....

On the contrary, that's just one half of (potential) Yin Yang

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Boffin

Re: A Future Surprise for Current Running Realities, the Rise of Virtual AIMachines .....

Oh I don't know... Isaac Asimov's 'The Last Question' comes to mind.

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Unhappy

Re: Evolution and power efficiency

I supposed hospitals and people on life support systems would just be 'collateral' damage to you.

Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge

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Meh

A bit of advance warning wouldn't have gone amiss

Se title.

After decades contributing to science, John Goodenough powers down

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Thumb Up

Damn good runtime

nuff sed.

BOFH: Cough up half a grand and we'll protect you from AI

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Thumb Up

As usual

Nice unexpected twist at the end

MIT discovery suggests a new class of superconductors

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Pint

Fascinating

I remember first hearing about superconductors when I was a teenager, and the boffins seem to be slowly but steadily chipping away at the limits,

P.S. This is also the sort of topic I most like to see on El Reg.

Scientists claim >99 percent identification rate of ChatGPT content

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Holmes

Good News!

Maybe...

The waters are becoming so muddied, that the only real way to find out what students know is to revert to one-to-one discussions - something that's been missing for a long time. Also, I can remember group discussions on a given theme where misconceptions quickly surfaced and could be corrected. That never seems to happen any more either.

Lawyers who cited fake cases hallucinated by ChatGPT must pay

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Thumb Up

Nice to see

I always like to hear news about those who think they are better/smarter than everyone else being publicly pulled up.

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

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Facepalm

Proof if needed

There's nothing so simple that it can't be screwed up by HR.

Inclusive Naming Initiative limps towards release of dangerous digital dictionary

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Boffin

Bollocks

The project I work with littered with these (apparently offensive) words. None of the devs have commented on their use, nor have any of the more advanced users who compile from source (and often give useful bug reports). There is no reason anyone else would even see the code and all the user text is fully clean, fluffy, and er... white :P

Amazon Prime too easy to join, too hard to quit, says FTC lawsuit

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Mushroom

Not been caught so far.

But it's very difficult to avoid. If they did manage to catch me I'd immediately cancel the credit card.

We just don't get enough time, contractor tasked with fact-checking Google Bard tells us

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Unhappy

It was great for a while

But the Internet is being destroyed by the likes of Google, Facebook, et al.

Just on search alone, I've noticed a steady decline in relevance of results to my queries.

Over 100,000 compromised ChatGPT accounts found for sale on dark web

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Holmes

I'm trying to be surprised

... but failing completely.

Data leak at major law firm sets Australia's government and elites scrambling

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Facepalm

Well that'll do a lot of good

Everyone will find out about all the details except those impacted by it.

No-no cop: Illinois bans drones from using facial recognition or weapons

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Facepalm

Stupid

The cops will just mount 24hr 'public safety' missions.

Not even Dynamics 365 ERP is safe from Microsoft's Copilot splurge

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Unhappy

Re: Generative AI in finance

On the other hand, that might be looking for a needle in a haystack

False negative stretched routine software installation into four days of frustration

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Unhappy

On the other hand...

We had some code that was checking the wrong variable, yet seemed to work perfectly on dozens of machines. That was until someone updated their OS at which point the program crashed immediately it was started - much head scratching ensued.

UK smart meter rollout years late and less than two thirds complete

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Meh

No Thanks

I'm on Economy7. I know exactly when the cheaper rate is active (and if I wasn't sure, there's an indicator on the meter). I fit all the power hungry usage into that time slot.

The ZX81 finally gets the keyboard it deserves

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Happy

Never actually owned a ZX81...

However it was this that started me on the slippery slope (for which there is no cure).

A friend had one that died for no apparent reason, and asked me to fix it as "You know transistor things". It was actually a very simple repair. There's a primitive switch-mode 5V regulator with the drive transistor sweating at the limit of it's rating. It had failed, so I replaced it with a slightly beefier one, and fitted a minimal heatsink for it (not a lot of room in there).

My friend had gone on holiday so I had about two weeks to play with it.

P.S. The first computer I owned was a BBC model B

Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs

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Coat

Re: narcissist egomaniac

Also, one of them is overweight while the other is fatter than is healthy.

Family-owned aerospace biz throws a wrench in Boeing IP lawsuit

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Unhappy

Re: "Boeing rewarded Wilson's efforts by brazenly stealing Wilson's intellectual property"

What do you mean "starting"?

Debian 12 'Bookworm' is the excitement-free Linux you've been waiting for

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Facepalm

Another devuan user here

... and not seeing any problems.

I'm surprised that debian is installing pipewire by default - even the developer says it's not ready.

Meet TeamT5, the Taiwanese infosec outfit taking on Beijing and defeating its smears

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Thumb Up

A very special type of people.

The amount of dedication for this sort of thing would exhaust most of us in weeks. But then, these people are literally fighing for their country.

Software rollout failure led to Devon & Cornwall cops recording zero crime for 3 months

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Boffin

Not so fast!

It was a deliberate ploy to lull the crims into a false sense of security and all pile into the area. They were then going to round them all up and export them to Rwanda

... or sommatt

Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget

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Happy

In days gone past

In the 405line analog TV days, a small farm in Wales lost all TV every summer, until the the next farm along changed hands, and the new owner was quite happy to have the copse 'pruned' - at the other guys expense.

Linux Foundation and pals – including Intel – back software ecosystem around RISC-V

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Unhappy

Guys, Please use more paragraphs!

Trying to read the previous two posts was nearly driving me cross-eyed

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Big Brother

Cautious optimism

Is it too much to hope that they will specify a simple boot system - write protected with a physical switch?

Absolute mad lad renders Doom in teletext

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Linux

Hmmm (ploink!)

How about a Pi Zero as a 'proper' teletext decoder alongside something like a Teensy or Arduino driving a (rather big) 2D array of tri-colour LEDs :)

Individual data platforms for all health providers under controversial NHS plans

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Flame

That's a nice NHS you've got there.

Shame if anything were to happen to it.

(icon depicting decades of good service being burned to the ground)

Top cloud players reject Microsoft's attempt to settle EU licensing complaint

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Big Brother

Upside Down

The entire business world is these days.

Instead of a business telling a supplier what they want, we have these huge corporations telling companies what they can have and how much they must pay for it. - no negotiation.

The FBI as advanced persistent threat – and what to do about it

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Hmmm

My mobile is an ultra-dumb one with a removable battery. It's on when I say it's on.

EU tells Twitter 'you can run but you can't hide' from disinformation policy

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Megaphone

Numpty

The twit calling for the EU to be "abolished".

Personally I'd much prefer that to happen to twitter.

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

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Unhappy

Re: PSUs

But that just takes most of the fun out of it