Posts by [e-mail]

MS Task Manager turns 30: Creator reveals how a 'very Unixy impulse' endured in Windows

This guy gets credit for putting his home number in the code, but when I put the account manager's number in some code I wrote for a client people got all uppity about it!

Meta can't afford its $600B love letter to Trump

Re: By the time all this is over

I think you are right about this, but it will also be true that the big players like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Open AI, etc will control a huge amount of cloud processing infrastructure. The investors will suffer but hey, that's bidniz.

It's Trump money, not real money.

Meta doesn't actually have to spend any real money here - they just need to announce that they are going to spend the money so that Trump can bask in 5 minutes of glory.

It's okay...

Trump never delivers on his promises, why should people deliver on promises to him.

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

The Windows Business Model is Obsolete

The Windows business model was based on the assumption that:

1) People would buy a "lifetime ownership"

2) The lifetime of the ownership was usually limited as a practical matter by the fact that people wanted to upgrade their hardware over couple of years

People, especially business users, are finding that the value of the hardware upgrade is limited these day. The old hardware works just as well as the new hardware. A significant percentage of business software is web based anyway. Most users can get along just find with something as simple as a Chromebook This has led to people using Windows 10 for a decade and expecting support for that entire time. Microsoft clearly didn't think of that. These days, there best product is the Azure cloud where it is easy to run a Linux workload.

So the cost of support for Windows has remained relatively constant but the direct revenue. They could have gone with a straightforward pay for support idea, but "increasing shareholder value" means making stock prices go up. It is hard to convince investors that a support business with worth bidding up a stock price.

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

Re: If wishes were horses, beggars would ride"

He he! > meant to say "a hard core version of Microsoft Windows", but instead I typed "version of money". My slip illustrates the problem though.

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride"

Let's face it. A "hard core" version of money would not increase Microsoft shareholder values.

Microsoft's data sovereignty: Now with extra sovereignty!

Let's be honest.

If Europeans are serious about data sovereignty, they cannot have an American company host their data. This follows exactly the same argument that Americans have been making about China for years - storage providers will surrender data to the host government if the government demands it.

Google says reports of a Gmail breach have been greatly exaggerated

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

If it seems to be free, someone has made it hard to identify the costs. Of course, your privacy is at risk when you use a free email server. Google makes its money by selling your data. People should switch to a paid service like Proton Mail and get security and privacy.

Anthropic's Claude is learning Excel so you don't have to

Above their pay scale

People who are forced to use excel but don't know how to use excel are not in a position to convince their employer to pay for AI.

Amazon axes 14,000 desk jobs in AI-powered slimming plan

What happens when AWS goes down?

Does Amazon management go down?

Everything you know about last week's AWS outage is wrong

You are missing the point

It isn't a matter of making an application go "multi-cloud" - rather it is a matter of making lots of companies depend on lots of different clouds. A company would still be at risk, just as it is at risk with a multi-cloud application deployment, but the impact to the Internet writ large would be smaller.

The perfect AWS storm has blown over, but the climate is only getting worse

Too big to fail

The technical problem is daunting but there might be non-technical remediation. If instead of hosting everything on Amazon, Google, and Microsoft cloud platforms, why not encourage lots of smaller cloud platforms with different teams. Currently lawyers of the big three would say that there is plenty of competition, but why not legally define competition as dozens or perhaps hundreds of cloud hosting companies. Each of these new companies would have the same problems as the big three, but on cloud hosting provider having problems would cause a lot few problems.

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

Were was the AI

AI system admins would have caught this is a second.

Meta convinces Blue Owl to cut $30B check for its Hyperion AI super cluster

Heads I Win, Tails You Loose.

How does this work out once it is clear that the promise of AI is empty and the bubble bursts? Well, Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and others will have some investors that are unhappy at losing a lot of money that was invested in all those datacenters built so that AI could "emerge". Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and others will still own those datacenters that can be used for lots of other things. The CEOs of Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and others will have made hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars riding the bubble up until the pop.

Looks like it is only the silly investors and the world economy that is left holding the bag.

CISA exec blames nation-state hackers and Democrats for putting America's critical systems at risk

It's always the Democrats... or the Inquisition!

I'm waiting for Trump to go "Last night my Big Mac McChicken McRib upset my stomach. Damn Democrats! Probably Obama and Hillary!"

AI makes phishing 4.5x more effective, Microsoft says

Finally a need for AI

Microsoft is still desperate to find a business that can be improved with AI. Phishing... Well, that's something.

Japan tells OpenAI to stop spiriting away its copyrighted anime

They are too rich to care about financial penalties

For that reason, the CEO should be subject to corporal punishment.

Former UK prime minister Sunak becomes human Clippy for Microsoft, Anthropic

Their is belief and then there is "business belief"

"Belief is one thing. Evidence is quite another." and being paid to say you believe in something is another totally different thing. We in the Democratic West have long depended on our political leaders to set the standard when it comes to lying. They are letting us down. If they lie all the time the lies don't work at all - they need to throw in some truth occasionally just to keep the public off balance. It is also true that they are making no effort to make their lies seem believable.

We are facing a lie quality crisis in the Western Democratic world. It's as if everyone has outsourced their lying to AI.

Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

Microsoft is getting desperate

If you have followed Microsoft things on social media for a while, you'll have noticed that more than a few of its "MVP"s have from time to time demanded more convenient ways to turn off CoPilot. This is a problem for Microsoft since it wants to feed all of a users interactions back into its LLM. Most users, even if they do think CoPilot is worthwhile, prefer to simply make occassional queries to it - much like Google (sorry Bing) search. "A better Bing" is not what Microsoft has been selling, and let's face it, no one pays for web searches, unless they are trying to avoid Google or Bing.

From the perspective of MS executives, forcing their programmer employees to use CoPilot gives them data to train their LLM on. It isn't like they are getting that from many non-Microsoft programmers. The same holds for Office products.

AI gets more 'meh' as you get to know it better, researchers discover

Me, I'm just a lowly programmer

My experience with GitHub CoPilot is pretty much the same as suggested by this article. Once you've adjusted you IDE so that CoPilot doesn't splash a half-dozen lines of code in your editor everytime you type a enw character you can get down to work. At that point you, you are just asking questions of a chatbot. It if very familiar to most programers who have grown accustomed to "Just Google"ing it over the last decade or so. The results are very much the same. You need to actually read source of the results and gather context for the answers. The summaries provided by the chatbot makes this much harder to do. The GitHub chatbox seems to just summarize all the code found in the GitHub repositories, regardless of code quality or purpose. Quite often things are presented like they are "best practices" when they are simply a survey of the latest things a bunch of junior developers have pushed up to their private repos.

In the end, you just need to understand stuff. AI, at best, is a "spicy search" that can help you find connections to things. The human still needs to understand those "things". Chatbots need to make it easier to find the sources of the infomation it is presenting so that the chatbot user can look at what the human did or said.

US Navy: I can't quit you, Azure

Question: Did Microsoft consultants "help" the Navy make this decision?

I am sure they helped in building the dependent software.

Return on investment for Copilot? Microsoft has work to do

Nothing lies worse than fake statistics

By injecting CoPilot into Office, Edge, Bing search, and Windows, Microsoft can say “70 percent of the Fortune 500 are using CoPilot in a pretty extensive way.” It is tere whenever they use their computer, but the usage is passive at best and annoying at worst. If Microsoft wants to convince me that people are adopting CoPilot, show me the revenue numbers.

Microsoft Surface 7 laptop: Nice hardware, shame about the OS

Microsoft Hardware Should Support Linux as an Option

Don't scoff. Microsoft has decent support for Linux on Windows via WSL and a partnership with Ubuntu on Azure. Why not go one step further? They would get a lot of credit for it, and Windows would not lose that many users.

KDE targets Windows 10 'exiles' claiming 'your computer is toast'

It isn't that hard - really

I've switched the family's PCs over to Linux Mint. I thought my decades of using Linux in a server environment would come in handy. That experience wasn't needed at all. Download a distribution to a memory stick (or CD), book from the media and install it. Even my wife's desire to use Office rather than Libre Office was not a problem, she is perfectly happy using the web hosted apps on Linux Edge Browser, which Microsoft has thoughtfully provided. The UI is very close to Windows 10.

Best pricing model for AI? Work in progress, says Salesforce

What's really going on here?

Is Salesforce simply trying to find a pricing formula that customers will buy in large enough quantities to break even?

Freshly discovered bug in OpenPGP.js undermines whole point of encrypted comms

Well they did say it was only pretty good.

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Cats just sit on the keyboard

Computer crashed, job done!

PowerSchool paid thieves to delete stolen student, teacher data. Looks like crooks lied

I cannot believe it

People who would steal teacher and student data, would lie about deleting the data? That is INCONCIEVABLE!

Microsoft updates the Windows 11 Start Menu

Re: Take my hat off to MS

Because operating systems are not simply programs, they are profit centers.

Ha, ha, ha! I moved to Linux Last Weekend.

I had been previewing early windows releases for quite some time. With the latest release it demanded I configure Phone Link every time I restarted my desktop. This was despite the fact that I hade disabled Phone Link in the settings. I suspect that Microsoft wanted access to your texts for AI purposes so it could compete with Gemini on an equal footing. I don't care.

20% discount offer on Windows 365 expires around same time as Windows 10 support

Time to stop whining

I upgraded my Lenovo Yoga 9 laptop to Linux. It had been the platform I used it for keeping up with the pre-release version of Windows, but I have decided it isn't worth keeping up with. I took my time this weekend and did the following:

1. Made sure I had all my files (documents, source code, photos, etc...) in a secure location in the cloud

2. I tried several different distros before I settled on one. It turns out that the "just try it on a memory stick" works really well.

3. While trying each distro, I installed the apps that I felt I really must have. This was not a heavy lift for me. Most things I use are available

4. Researched some issues I couldn't test with an install, like setting up my old Logitech K350 wireless keyboards, and verifying that Signal Desktop will work.

5. I settled on Linux Mint because I didn't dislike the Windows desktop look and feel and didn't feel motivated to learn a new one.

6. Installed Linux Mint in about 45 minutes.

7. Set my preferences for updates, 5 minutes.

9. Added my preferred browser (including extensions), email client, password manager, signal-desktop, Spotify, and modified the menu in about an hour. This included trying each out.

10. Restored my data.

So I made a meal of it, but the whole thing, including trying three distros took about 4 or 5 hours spent leisurely over 3 days. At this point the UX is basically the same as Windows 11 with the exception that the shortcut keys are different. The only app I wanted to install but couldn't is Windows Terminal (don't judge me!). The Linux terminal is fine, but not quite as choice.

Virgin Atlantic is piloting an OpenAI agent in to help with the 'customer journey'

Wow! Will AI make the seats wider?

Probably not, but it will say the seats are wider.

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

This is understandable.

Microsoft is unable to sell any of its AI products despite exspending an enormous amount of marketing resources. There is like one guy, using an AI code assistant with C/C++. Does anyone really expect Microsoft to give up the one paying customer for C/C++ AI coding assistants without a fight?

Trump thinks we can make iPhones in the US just like China. Yeah, right

A used care salesman is not really a "businessman".

Trump has never successfully run a business. He has been successful in convincing others to invest in his "concepts". He doesn't recognize that a "concept" is not a "business plan". The closest he has ever come to running a business is "The Apprentice" reality television show. Of course, reality television is anything but reality. In Trump's mind though, and in the mind of his supporters, he was a real business star.

Generative AI app goes dark after child-like deepfakes found in open S3 bucket

Re: Technology for the evil

That's capitalism for you.

Microsoft unveils finalized EU Data Boundary as European doubt over US grows

The USA is now China

A lot of the comments here voicing concern over an American company hosting data in Europe sounds like the concerns voiced in the USA over TikTok. These are realistic concerns. Does any think Donald Trump and his government is more trustworthy than Xi Jinping and the Chinese government?

Microsoft shows off novel quantum chip that can scale to 'a million qubits'. So far: Eight

AI, quantum computing, fusion power

All will be practical in just a few years - as soon as a breakthrough happens. The problem is breakthroughs happen at their own time.

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

How many Windows 10 user does it take to install Windows 11

It takes three. One to do the install and two to complain about how Windows 10 was way better.

Yes but now that Windows 11 contains AI, everyone will want to upgrade from Windows 10!

Or... maybe not.

Windows 11 stages a comeback – still miles behind older sibling

For many, the question is "why upgrade?"

For many, there is no reason to upgrade to Windows 11. If their existing software works, what's the point? Microsoft's business model of:

1. Make some user interface changes to the OS

2. Bump the version number

3. Charge customers for new licenses

is not working. I suspect that de-supporting Windows 10 will simply encourage more users to move to other operating systems, like MacOS or Linux. For many, hosting business apps in the cloud and interacting with them via something like ChromeOS (another version of Linux) will make more sense.

AI agents? Yes, let's automate all sorts of things that don't actually need it

No one wants to pay for AI

OpenAI needs as many stories as possible to keep that investor money coming in. I suspect, that OpenAI, like Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Meta are finding it hard to sell AI products to end users. Giving stuff away until AI catches on is not an option for OpenAI. For that reason, they keep coming up with new applications that people *might* want.

Tool touted as 'first AI software engineer' is bad at its job, testers claim

Re: Stop the AI Marketing spin

Well you see, a buffer overrun is when code reads or writes past the end of a buffer. It is actually well named. It describes literally what is happening. An AI "hallucination" is not like that.

Pornhub lockdown and fact-free Zuckbots – welcome to 2025

Three competing wants.

People want to: 1) Protect children from porn, 2) Allow adults to see porn if they wish, 3) Allow anonymous access to the internet. You cannot have all three things at one time. Many argue that anonymity of access and the right to adult porn is more important that protecting children. Southern US states are arguing that protecting children is the most important thing, so either anonymity of Internet access or access to porn must go.

Personally, I'd be okay banning porn online. Adults could still access porn offline. so that "freedom of speech" would still be upheld. The strong identity needed keep children from accessing porn, while allowing adults to access porn would be a nightmare.

Australia lays fiendish tax trap for Meta – with an expensive escape hatch

A modest proposal

"Social media" makes money by having citizens create stuff that other people want to view. This approach creates content for social media companies for free. Why tax the social media companies at a very high rate so that the product created by the citizens contributes to the local economy. So, for example, in India there are about a quarter billion Indian citizens producing content for Facebook. Assuming that Indian subscribers make up 10% of all Facebook subscribers, make Facebook pay a tax of say 70% on 10% of their global revenue.

This might seem extreme, but let's face it, Facebook, Google, etc... are getting that content for free. Why not tax them?

The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

Change takes time

Porting a massive installed base takes forever. The first step is to stop creating new projects in C/C++

Microsoft still not said anything about unexpected Windows Server 2025 installs

Copilot?

It would be amusing to learn that Microsoft is drinking their own cool aid and using Copilot in the production of patches. :-)

Amusing but not surprising.

GenAI's dirty secret: It's set to create a mountainous increase in e-waste

Fear of missing out

All this waste and pollution because some CEOs and investors are suffering from FOMO. Maybe AI will be the next big thing - can't risk not investing in it. It reminds me of Web3.

Smart homes may be a bright idea, just not for the dim bulbs who live in 'em

Blame the Tech Bros!

John Scalzi explains all this in his book, "Starter Villain". His best fictional example was the pitch that proclaimed, "Your testicles as a service!" The pitch was for a type of contraceptive that involved testicular surgery and a phone app to turn your fertility on and off. That's too unrealistic you say? I expect to see it announced any day.

Anyway, the book is a fun read about this common complaint.

AI to power the corporate Windows 11 refresh? Nobody's buying that

Marketing...sigh

If desktop search is not enough... Make it spicy!