Posts by Joe Gurman

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

Re: Feed your AI Finnegans Wake

….or anything by e e cummings.

The big FOSS vendors don't eat their own dogfood – they pay for proprietary groupware

Something....

....something, something, something about dogfood, something, something.

Apple's Creator Studio creates a subscription where free apps used to live

Um….

….I installed the “15” versions on my Mac last week (they appeared automagically on my iThings after an OS patch. I’ve gotten exactly one “Subscribe” pop-up since (and I’ve used all three apps). Is this article panicking much, or is this just the normal slag Apple reflex showing?

Reviving a CIDCO MailStation – the last Z80 computer

The original Mac 128K….

….display was 512 x 342.

Taiwan tells Uncle Sam its chip ecosystem ain't going anywhere

Interesting way of listing TSMC customers….

Omitting, as it dies, their number 2 customer (and until very recently, number 1), Apple.

Microsoft spends billions on AI, converts just 3.3% of Copilot Chat users

Nice to see that the market....

....was not amused by the mismatch of all that AI spending and such minimal adoption (shares off 10% since the day after the earnings call).

Systemd daddy quits Microsoft to prove Linux can be trusted

“The” other?

*cough*

Claude Code's prying AIs read off-limits secret files

The only way to win….

…. is not to play.

France to replace US videoconferencing wares with unfortunately named sovereign alternative

And….

….the identically pronounced Vizio has the distinction of being the only manufacturer of TVs to have been fined by the US Federal Trade Commission for watching its customers, well watching what they were watching, without their permission (in 2015). The outfit is now owned by Walmart, who would never ever do anything like that.

Succession: Linux kernel community gets continuity plan for post-Linus era

Probably good to have some plans….

….but oftentimes, they break when actually applied. Cf. The Death of Stalin.

Headset hype meets harsh reality as Apple and Meta VR shipments fizzle in 2025

Re: The Next Big Thing

It’s never to early to adopt a technology that will get you ounched in the face — with the device on your face.

Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

Durn kids

Get off my lawn, and take your 64-bit word size and your GUIs and your hi-def monitors and your inefficient libraries with you!

Tired of sky-high memory prices? Buckle up, we're in this for the long haul

Re: All right! It's time for human ingenuity to step up...

Forget about the vibecoding. At least in the US, Amazon is now sticking its Rufus AI “assistant” on every page when ordering groceries (can’t attest to other things, but ‘tis the season), from Amazon Fresh and Whole Wallet. A month or so ago, you could tell it to go away, and it would at least for a certain amount of time. But now there’s no way to get rid of it other than closing the little pop-up window, which isn’t so little because it actually covers a lot of the things you want to look at. If you close it, it’ll reappear as soon as you enter another search term. So my fearless prediction for 2026 is that international commerce will crash, not because the orange doofus keeps spinning the dial on the tariffs-o-meter, but because everybody gives up on Amazon and all its resellers.

Apple….

…is well known for charging an arm and a leg for memory upgrades from the base model. Maybe they have some leeway to help out the poor punter for a few years?

In any case, the “integrated” memory in a (single CPU chip) M4 Mac Studio has a bandwith of 480 GByte/s. Not entirely shabby, if not (yet) HBM-like, by a factor of two.

UK.gov accused of Grinching Christmas by ignoring phone theft scourge

Re: Interesting bit on the BBC 2 months ago

All these suggestions are so genteel. Arm a few dozen coppers with lethal handguns and pay them a £50 bounty for every phone thief they plug. Yee ha!

England keeping pen and paper exams despite limited digital expansion

Re: There is no requirement for a specific make of pen

Child abuse?

US freezes $42B trade pact with UK over digital tax row

The last time there was a "know-nothing populist arsehole"

....candidate for the democratic nomination for the presidency was in 1972, when George Wallace was running well behind more popular (and in George McGovern's case, more truly populist) candidates when he was shot in the county where I now live, and crippled. Since then, the racist-anti-intellectual, anti-government market has been cornered by Republicans.

Democrats may still nominate sphincters, but not know-nothings.

Apple, Google forced to issue emergency 0-day patches

Re: Thanky for the reminder

Right. And a lucky thing it is that they're nagged.

Roomba maker iRobot gets cleaned out in Chapter 11

Aaaaand….

….you’ll be here all week, right?

Datacenters are hoarding grid power just in case, says Uptime Institute

If....

AI "data" (really compute) centers follow the example of Mad King Elon's RacistAI™ farms, high-demand power falls back on rows of methane-powered generators. Swell (not).

Re: Hmm

Uh.... no. Any sensible wind/solar deployment has battery or "battery" (e.g. water pumping) as part of the energy solution.

Firefox adds AI Window, users want AI wall to keep it out

Safari?

I believe on every Apple platform, there’s a simple “AI. No thanks” Setting option. As in, nowhere on the device.

De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

Microsoft….

…. probably didn’t sue any of the originators of the distros because they remembered how they got off scot free when Apple, with considerable justification, tried to sue them for the visual language in the Windows desktop, stolen directly from the Mac OS of the day (System some-number-or-other).

SpaceX and Musk called on to rescue China's Shenzhou-20 crew

Debris?

Tiangong spends its time between 340 and 450 km. The 2007 Chinese ASAT test target was orbiting at ~ 865 km at the time. Ant debris that made it down the 400 - 500 km difference in heights had a significant radially downward component to its velocity, and would long ago have deorbited.

Rideshare giant moves 200 Macs out of the cloud, saves $2.4 million

And people….

Study after study has shown that human (admin) costs for Windows are way higher per seat than for macOS seats. Whether that’s true for systems used as servers, I don’t know, but based on my own experiences ~ 7 years ago and earlier, it at least held true fir our mix of server and desktop deployments. The Linux per-system cost for admin appeared to be similar to the Mac cost for servers, but my experience was limited, so it’ll have to remain “appeared” until I read a credible study.

Amazon's AI specs aim to stop delivery drivers getting lost between van and porch

Re: LOL, typical corporate mindset

Sorry, there aren’t 5hat many competent people in any country, and most of those already have far better-paying jobs, working conditions, and hours than the folks driving for Amazon.

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

Re: DNS

Except when it’s BGP.

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

Copious amounts of salt....

....should probably be applied, as jamf is an app for managing groups of Macs, but they're claiming, as the internal user IT group at IBM did a decade or so ago when they started allowing users to decide between Macs or PC/Windows for use on the job, that the life cycle costs (initial purchase plus support) is lower for Macs in enterprise deployments. the basic argument, as I recall from the IBM slide set, was that is took ~ 1/3 the number of IT professionals to care and feed Mac users as a similar number of PC users. And people, as we all know, are a lot more expensive, year by year, than whatever a laptop or desktop costs.

https://www.jamf.com/blog/total-cost-of-ownership-mac-versus-pc-in-the-enterprise/

London cops unplug iPhone crime ring said to nick 40% of city's mobiles

And yet

“We're calling on phone manufacturers such as Apple and Samsung to do more to support us and protect their customers – especially around phone security and reuse.”

And yet the article glaringly fails to mention that the intercepted package was found because an owner of one of the purloined iPhones had Find My enabled on the device, and was able to direct police to its location.

AI agent hypefest crashing up against cautious leaders, Gartner finds

Just 7%

Seems like a lot, really. I mean it took only one outfit, Cyberdyne, to end civilization as we know it by deploying autonomous AI.

Blood-red bot stalks the burbs armed with . . . groceries

Can't wait for the hilarity that will ensue....

....should DD deploy these in my neighborhood: the young, stupid males with minimally souped-up cars with abnormally loud exhausts who like to vroom-vroom and screech-screech on the public roads will no doubt compete to see who can punt the red blobs the farthest.

Submarine cable security is all at sea, and UK govt 'too timid' to act, says report

Re: Tourists at the Bude Tunnel

But the passive voice should be eschewed.

Intern had no idea what not to do, so nearly mangled a mainframe

Was there something….

…. about the word “intern” you didn’t understand?

Re: Expensive Lessons

“ Someone must be responsible for every mistake.” And that person is never a manager.

Dell enters the earbud market with kit you can control from the cloud

Typo?

US$229 is $20 _less_ than the AirPods Pro 3 list price.

Hardware inspector fired for spotting an error he wasn't trained to find

Dang

I’m retired now, but I spent a measurable part of my three decades at my last employer’s talking back to piss-poor mangers in public. At least prior to the current US administration, that was not a firing offense. Indeed, it appeared to improve morale among both the decent managers and all the rest of us.

British spreadsheet wizard will take mad skillz to Vegas after taking national Excel crown

Why dies the idea of an Excel competition….

….make me think of a galley slaves’ competition?

Cybercriminals pwn 850k+ Americans' healthcare data

Really

I guess you can't expect Vultures to have their North American geography sorted out before their first three cuppas.

French jet left circling while Corsican controller caught Zs

I'm certain....

....that the liter of wine with dinner had nothing to do with it.

How and why Linux has thrived after three decades in Kernelland

"Another dozen years later, it was COVID-19, and yet kernel 5.6 came out like normal."

Even Mr. Torvalds realized that having all the developers cooped up at home was probably the ideal dev environment.

https://xkcd.com/2276

Two Scattered Spider teens charged over attack on London’s transport network

Re: Neglect

I didn’t see anything indicating they were being prosecuted for being geniuses. The prosecution was brought based on evidence that they had broken one or more laws. Whether the people responsible for “critical national infrastructure” should be legally liable for shoddy ITsec is something else entirely.

In the meantime, the two alleged perps were remanded in custody, awaiting further court appearances. May be some time before they walk, or crack, free.

‘IT manager’ needed tech support because they had never heard of a command line

Re: progression or lack of

Considering the incredibly obsolete systems that particular tax outfit depends on, it's probably just as well they don't try to recruit managers from outside.... they'd probably be liable for injuries incurred by interviewees tripping on the first step in their terrified rush out the door.

Some truth, some obvious lies

The "I manage people, not content" line stems from the immediate post-WW II dictum, supposedly originating at Harvard Business School, that a good manager could manage anything: the students needed to learn how to manage, not any of the semi-infinite types of business they's all go on to manage in their careers.

Evidently, Steve Jobs Mark I bought into that philosophy when he recruited John Sculley, who'd spent the previous 17 years of his life selling (in Jobs's own words) sugared water and buying advertising prices ~ a factor of ten higher than his competitors'. It was never clear that Sculley understood the personal computer business, nor Apple's niche in it. Differences of opinion with SJ M I led to Jobs's departure and the founding of NeXT.

Apple's board ditched Sculley and hired Michael Spindler, who had excellent credentials (DEC, Intel, President of Apple Europe) but figured that the only way to reign in losses was to fire as many people as possible, and then try to sell the company (to IBM, Sun, or Philips). He lasted less than three years before the Apple board canned him.

Then came Gil Amelio, a guy who knew computer hardware from the ground up (Bell Labs, Fairchild, Rockwell, National Semiconductor) as well as having a Ph.D. in physics. You know, a smart guy. Yet he spent months trying to lowball the price of BeOS, failed, and then contributed his one historical decision: buying NeXT for twice what he'd tried to offer Be. In less than 18 months after starting as Apple CEO, Amelio was out on his ear, thank to Jobs's lobbying the board. The rest, as they say, is history — but remember that beyond soldering, Jobs's hardware experience was extremely limited, and it was his partnership with Wozniak that jump-started the company and the industry. Jobs should be respected for interesting himself in the hardware just enough to allow him to pursue one product vision after another. Those may be visions that most people reading this site mock, but that punters literally lined up in mall hallways and on city streets to turn over their hard-earned <insert currency name here> to buy. Jobs never knew everything about the technologies that went into his "magical" devices, but he was intellectually curious enough to learn what he needed to know about them to make superior (as measured by sales) products. and let's face it, in the business world, it's only the bottom line that matters.

After nearly half a century in deep space, every ping from Voyager 1 is a bonus

Re: We couldn't do it again

Guess what? The this bag warning labels predate Apollo 11.

White House nixes NASA unions amid budget uncertainty

No federal employee….

….is allowed to strike, collective bargaining agreement or otherwise.

Online property ad reveals looted Nazi war art, triggers police raid

Re: Real Estate Photos

…. or at least a part-time for journalists who who resent the plundering of their country’s art treasures by the Nazis. Can’t imagine why?

Re: Tribe

I saw that movie….

Unfortunately, many of them, including Eichmann, transported themselves to Argentina, where the movement probably has plenty of second- and third-generation sympathizers. Most likely, that’s where the painting is.

xAI fires legal rocket at Apple and OpenAI claiming they're locking out Grok

Re: Accolades. Superior features...

All human beings are creatures of habit. Get one of them used to their every whim being fulfilled by suckups and misguided women willing to be impregnated by the serial big daddy, and it's very hard for that human to recall that there was ever a different way of life. Hopefully, the Starship that takes the Mad King to Mars will be large enough to accommodate a sufficient number of sycophants and uterus-for-hires to satisfy his bipolar wishes.

Re: Can we just.....

Can we start a GoFundMe for building Mad King Elon's castle, pleasure (rock) gardens, and amusement park (CyberTruck demo derby track) on Mars? On condition he promises never to return, of course.

Two wrongs don’t make a copyright

Re: A bad decision. Stupidity or Corruption?

In an ideal world. Do you live in one?