Posts by Dave K

Microsoft appears to move on from its most loyal ‘customers’ – Contoso and Fabrikam

Re: It is a sad day for Microsoft

Yeah, looks like Contoso migrated to Linux and LibreOffice. Probably to get away from all the Copilot bollocks...

Dell says Windows 11 transition is far slower than Win 10 shift as PC sales stall

Re: "the potential of the AI PC"

As it stands, an AI PC is a solution looking for a problem. It will remain that way until a genuinely useful program/feature comes along that can actually utilise the NPU.

If there's no killer feature that can utilise the NPU and provide real-world benefit? What's the point in shelling out for an AI PC? At the moment, the only thing they've got is "future proofing"...

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

That's the issue in a nutshell. AI is like having a young, enthusiastic intern working for you. Sure there's a few simpler bits and pieces they can probably help with, but they are prone to making mistakes and lack the experience of the more grizzled veterans on your team.

So when you have something vitally important to work upon, you'd be crazy to hand it off to the intern because there's a high likelihood of mistakes in the work they'd return, and you'd have to spend a lot more time testing, validating and fixing their work. So in these cases, you'd usually either hand it to one of your more experienced and dedicated co-workers, or you'd tackle it yourself - because at the end of the day, you're accountable for the end-product.

There is a place for interns to provide some cheap value, but there's also a lot of cases where you simply need skill and experience for a piece of work. Plus of course with an intern, you're trying to train them up to become the grizzled veterans of tomorrow - something that doesn't really exist for an AI tool.

That's how it is for me. I'm accountable for the work I produce. Yes, I delegate some bits of it to co-workers in the team and utilise some "cheaper" heads for certain more utilitarian bits, but anything that's mission critical I either tackle myself or only entrust to someone who's competence and experience is without question. Why on earth would I risk my job and my credibility by allowing AI to make a botched attempt at my work just so I can grab a cup of coffee?

Commodity memory prices set to double as fabs pivot to AI market

AI - the gift that keeps on giving...

Microsoft's first Windows 10 ESU Patch Tuesday release fails for some

"evolving into an agentic OS."

Here we go again, MS doing what they want to do - not what users want them to do. Truly the era of enshittification shows no signs of abating...

Dame Emma Thompson gives the 'AI revolution' both barrels

Re: Speaks for many of us

Exactly. My wife sometimes struggles to structure letters, statements etc. in a way she's happy with. She now asks ChatGPT to draft something, sometimes asks it to re-write in a more concise manner, then reviews, tweaks and ultimately uses that. It saves her time and she finds it useful. That's great! It's a tool being used for a beneficial purpose.

Similarly, I have some colleagues at work that find Copilot useful for generating minutes/actions off the back of Teams calls. Again, no problem with this. If an AI tool is providing value, great!

It's the incessant nagging, the icons and popups all over the place, AI being shoved into stupid places where it provides no value, updates that turn AI icons/features back on after I've disabled them. Those are the problems.

Speaks for many of us

Well said Emma, many of us feel the same way.

I want to be clear, I have no problem with AI tools existing. They have some (limited) uses, certain people like to use them and that's fine.

What I do object to is having them rammed down my throat all the f**king time. I'm sick and tired of Copilot popups everywhere, Copilot icons appearing where they serve no purpose (ie, Notepad), Teams desperately and repeatedly nagging me to pin the Copilot icon to the toolbar, Adobe Reader displaying popups telling me I can "use the AI assistant to summarise this" when I'm just trying to view a boarding pass, AI icons and nags appearing in instant messaging apps (looking at you WhatsApp).

Heck, the other day I was in the market for a replacement vacuum cleaner and there's now a Samsung cordless vac range with AI and a connected app. For Pete's sake, why? Who on earth is asking for this? I told my wife (who likes and regularly uses ChatGPT), her response "That's just stupid!".

Vendors need to realise that they are in serious danger of alienating an increasing large volume of the population by nagging and pushing AI too incessantly and in too many stupid places. We're sick of it to the point that I now actively avoid anything marketed as AI, because it'll just be filled with irritating, annoying and pointless slop most the time.

Apple's ultra-thin iPhone flops as foldable iPad hits a crease

If I wanted a lighter phone with less functionality, I'd also want it to be smaller in terms of dimensions, not just thinner and flimsier...

Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day

Re: AC = Artificial Clairvoyance

Copilot can "listen in" to the meeting (assuming Teams) then create minutes/actions off the back of it. Not used it myself, but I know a couple who have.

Boris Johnson confesses: He's fallen for ChatGPT

Re: Johnson sacking

Both actually. It was the Chris Pincher affair that brought him down to start with.

Notably his MPs being informed that he had never heard the sexual misconduct allegations about Pincher before, many of them parroted this to the media. Then within 24 hours, the media showed proof that he had in fact been previously informed. As the latest in a long string of scandals and with his own MPs feeling lied to by Blonde-Leader, that triggered the waves of resignations until he folded.

Of course, had he survived that, the misleading-parliament scandal could well have ended things for him if he wasn't already gone...

Microsoft hypes PCs with NPUs, still can't offer a good reason to buy one

AI implementations have been around for a good couple of years now, yet still no "must-have" AI feature has arisen that needs this NPU. All we've seen is a small handful of gimmicks that make little real-world difference. Meanwhile, MS's approach is "Please buy a computer with a pointless CPU feature. I'm sure we'll find a useful purpose for it eventually!".

Maybe instead of blathering on all the time, why don't they try working on a useful feature instead. Make people *want* to get a PC with an NPU, rather than repeatedly pushing them to buy something which currently has no real-world benefit?

Saying that, I am also concerned that NPUs will become part of Windows 12's requirements - despite how useless the NPU currently is...

Amazon will refund $1.5B to 35M customers allegedly duped into paying for Prime

Re: I quit Prime. You can too, eventually.

I ended up being conned into signing up for Prime several years ago.

The website usually has a big green "Yes, I want Prime" button at check out, with a smaller grey "No thanks" button next to it. A few years ago, they changed it such that the grey button *also* became a "Yes I want Prime" button with the opt-out shifted to an ordinary link underneath. Obviously thanks to muscle memory, you go through checkout and click the small grey button. To say I was pissed off when a big "Welcome to Prime!!" screen appeared is an understatement.

Thankfully it was just a free trial, but I immediately cancelled it, then swore blind that I would never, ever pay for Prime as long as I lived thanks to their dodgy, underhand tactics. I do actually try to avoid buying from Amazon where I can, but sometimes the cost/palaver involved with avoiding it is too much.

BOFH: HR discovers the limits of vertical mobility

Re: Stair oil

That and the building address being part of the local Ambulance driver's "knowledge" test...

Stair oil

I started to think that the BOFH would be screwed if they ever got a "healthy" head of HR that liked to take the stairs for a change, but then I remembered the PFY's "stair oil" from a few years back and realised - there is truly no safe way of migrating between floors in that building...

Boffins fool a self-driving car by putting mirrors on traffic cones

Re: Perty cool study

They vary in terms of effectiveness. I find the "driver assist" features in my Merc CLA to be OK. Never had an issue with phantom braking and the "lane assist" is pretty laid back as well and only intervenes if you actually drift across the white lines. My sister's Skoda Fabia however is awful. Constantly tugging at the wheel, even when you are in your lane, plus it's utterly unable to cope with single-track roads and contraflows. It's now muscle memory for her to disable it every time she starts the car. Ironically, she feels safer that way!

Office 2016 and 2019 face October 14 execution date

Literally the only feature in earlier Office that I miss is the XLOOKUP function in Excel. Even then you can work around it via INDEX/MATCH. I can't think of anything else I use in Office that hasn't been present for 20+ years...

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

"there remains no killer AI app to justify the hardware"

Yep, still a solution looking for a problem. Who knows, maybe a killer application or two will eventually come along. For now though, having an NPU and "Copilot+" certification is largely irrelevant.

How did you find the performance of none-native code on the device? Would be interested to hear how x86 code performs and the impact emulation has on battery life.

After deleting a web server, I started checking what I typed before hitting 'Enter'

Honey, I'm ~

Google tries to trump iPhone launch with AI-powered Pixel 10 range

Re: Sooo

The bubble hasn't yet burst unfortunately. It's the current in-fashion shiny-shiny for developers, so to try and justify all the work that has been done with AI, they're just shoving it everywhere. The bubble will hopefully burst soon, a lot of the AI shit will go away (where nobody is using it or where it's not generating any value) and we'll hopefully end up with a more sensible deployment of limited AI in areas where it actually has some uses.

Personally I can't wait for that moment to arrive. I'm seeing more and more AI-fatigue kicking in as people become increasingly sick and tired of having AI shoved down their throats at every possible opportunity...

Millions of age checks performed as UK Online Safey Act gets rolling

"without collecting or storing personal data, unless absolutely necessary."

Hands-up how many people believe this? That these sites will not store anything and will discard photos/scans as soon as they process them?

There's no way in hell I'm going to upload sensitive, personal data such as driving license scans to a random, unverified 3rd party website when I have no idea of how they're processing that data, how it may be stored, etc. etc. It's just asking for a data breach and a treasure-trove of sensitive information being leaked online.

Of course, so many people think you're only affected if you watch porn. However, I've seen these age checks popping up for large sections of Reddit (anything flagged as NSFW - including simple subreddits like r/beer), songs on Spotify with explicit lyrics, etc. etc. It's just ridiculous.

So, it'll remain a hard-pass from me regarding uploading facial scans and passport photos and instead I'll just get around the censorship via VPN. What a bloody mess...

Windows 10 turns 10: Dying OS just worked, lacked compatibility chaos

Windows 10 was not a "good" operating system. At its best, it was "okay" - which isn't exactly a glowing endorsement.

I often think it gets remembered more fondly than it should due to what came before (Windows 8) and after (Windows 11). But let's be honest, the ads, the increasing pushes for a "Microsoft account", the way MS forced it on people in the early days - including downloading it without permission and over metred connections, the way it was *way* too trigger-happy to reboot after installing updates, none of these were good things.

That's before you get to all the other issues. The flat, boring, lifeless and utterly depressing UI, the split between Settings/Control Panel (*still* not resolved), the annoying and cheap-sounding "bingy-bong" sound effects, the broken throbber (only OS I know where it isn't a smooth, looping animation), Metro applications that ignore accessibility settings. In essence, it constantly felt like a piece of unfinished, beta software. Never like a finished and polished product. Way too much of it felt like half-finished "placeholders" that were still awaiting the final code/sounds/design.

Don't get me wrong, I prefer it to Windows 11 - even if Win 11 does look nicer, but it was not a "sane" or good OS. You've got to go back to Win 7 for that.

Fresh UK postcode tool points out best mobile network in your area

Well, the map view is correct in my experience for where I live - Three and EE get a good 4G signal that works indoors, O2 and Vodafone get a rubbish Edge signal that only works outdoors.

But then on the "performance" view, O2 gets 81% whereas EE only gets 80%? That I don't get. How can I be "more likely" to stream video on a flaky 1-bar Edge signal than a 4-bar 4G signal? I mean, both count as "having coverage" I guess, but it's completely at odds with what the map view (and reality) says.

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Re: I touch it and it breaks!

>> "I can foresee a new hardware requirement: minimum 42" 4k screen."

That's going to make future laptops a bit of a bugger!

Please tell us Reg: Why are AI PC sales slower than expected?

And yet you never see that mentioned in the advertising blurbs!

What is the use case for these? To me, it still isn't clear. I don't use AI at all, but my wife does use ChatGPT at times - however she doesn't need an "AI PC" to use that.

I'm still waiting for a big app or a big use-case/clear benefit from having an NPU on your PC. And no, that abomination known as Recall doesn't count!

To me, it's just another case of a solution looking for a problem...

VodafoneThree's a crowd – now comes the hard bit

I'm wary of this because the small Scottish village I live in has a decent 4G Three signal (network I currently use), but a pitiful 2G Vodafone signal. Really hope they do things properly when merging the networks and they don't just decide to scrap the Three network and move everyone to Vodafone's infrastructure. Otherwise I'll need to try and find a new provider!

It also helps that because I've been with Three for a long while, I still get free EU roaming from them (they only introduced roaming charges for "New" customers back in 2021 or so). Vodafone however have slapped roaming on everyone. Again, another part of my current service I hope isn't degraded. Not holding my breath through...

Admin brought his drill to work, destroyed disks and crashed a datacenter

Re: And the lesson we learn today is:

Unless the "percussive maintenance" requires bludgeoning a lazy server admin over the head with aforementioned hammer drill...

What would a Microsoft engineer do to Ubuntu? AnduinOS is the answer

Re: "reshapes GNOME in the image of Windows 11"

Indeed, and all the worst bits too. The lousy Win 11 Start Menu, the awful toggle-switch design. If you're going to make it look like Windows, for gods sake don't incorporate all the worst bits of Win 11!

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: Nuke from orbit

Heh, I wrote better-organised code than that when I was an 11-year-old being taught to program in Pascal by my dad on our old 386!

BOFH: HR tries to think appy thoughts

Re: "HR tries to think appy thoughts"

1996 is when the PFY was introduced if I recall. Blimey that seems a long time ago!

808 lines of BBC BASIC and a dream: Arm architecture turns 40

There is a fantastic multi-part series of articles on Ars Technica covering the creation of ARM, how it came to be built, why its power consumption was so low, and of course what happened over the following years with ARM being spun off from Acorn. It's well worth a read.

And Happy Birthday ARM!

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

Familiar!

"Complicated contracts which can only be cancelled on a harvest moon in a leap year by repeating the word "multifunction" backwards, three times, into rotary dial telephone, after calling the unlisted phone number of a squid farmer in East Bangladesh. And leaving a message."

Has Simon been looking at some of the lease agreements from one of my former employers? This sounds strangely familiar!

Elon Musk makes another cut – to his time at DOGE

Not sure this is going to do Tesla much good.

DOGE was only the tip of the iceberg for the anti-Musk sentiment around the world. It doesn't change the fact that he did two Nazi-salutes (which he has never apologised for), nor him trying to (essentially) bribe voters in Wisconsin recently, nor of course his unwavering and very public support for the orange man-child.

Microsoft lists seven habits of highly effective Windows 11 users

Re: My hot tip

And replace the Start Menu.

And replace the Taskbar

And block all the adverts for Onedrive / O365

And block the Microsoft store

And set up a local account and bin the "Microsoft" account

And stop Teams auto-launching at boot.

But yeah, once you've done about 30 different things to modify and tweak the living shit out of it, it becomes acceptable. A glowing endoresement I think you'll agree!

Please sir, may we have some Moore? Doesn't look that way

fairly obvious

For several decades, we knew this time would come for one simple reason: there is a limit to how small circuitry on microchips can become. Once you are down to atomic levels (gates and components only an atom or two in size), you cannot shrink further. It is physically impossible.

Even as you approached those limits, the difficulties with shrinking more become ever-more-difficult to overcome.

We've been spoiled by several decades of consistent progress, but you cannot argue with physics.

The only alternatives (other than efficiency gains) are to use either organic compounds in completely different approaches to conventional silicon, or quantum processing. I do expect these will come to fruition eventually, but the whole "keep getting smaller" trend always had finite phyisical limits at the end of the day.

Windows 11 adds auto-recovery, kills offline setup loophole

Simple, it's a bare-faced lie. It's typical marketing bluster for trying to explain away a crappy change. Anyone who can use bypassnro actively does NOT want a Microsoft account, it's not something a home user does by accident...

Musk's xAI swallows Musk's X in ego-friendly, all-stock deal

Really??

"the future could not be brighter"

And yet with people departing in droves, revenue dropping from $5bn in 2021 to $2.5bn in 2024, that has to be a very low bar they've set themselves if the current situation qualifies as a resounding success ...

Linus Torvalds forgot to release Linux 6.14 for a whole day

Re: We are human ...

Exactly this, he made a mistake and owned up to it, rather than trying to weasel out with excuses. Respect!

And as mistakes go, it's not major or anything.

Apple has locked me in the same monopolistic cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

Re: Horses for courses

You are consuming information - audio, visual or whatever.

Agreed, plus there are still options for keeping it supported:

1) Install a Linux distro

2) Install Windows 11 via Rufus with the hardware checks disabled.

The second option isn't completely perfect as you'll have to do an annual "feature" update from installation media as Windows Update won't grab feature updates automatically, but it does work.

Google confirms Gulf of Mexico renamed to appease Trump – but only in the US

Trump can do what he wants here (sadly), but why does the Trump name also show up for none-American users (Mexican users excluded of course)? The UK recognises it as the Gulf of Mexico, so why display Trump's vanity name for it underneath? If the UK were to decide it's called "Gulf of Atlantic" for example, then Germany declares it is "Das Strait" would we end up with 4, 5, 6 different names beginning to show in parenthesis? Just show the internationally recognised name for it for none Americans and leave it at that.

RIP Raymond Bird: Designer of UK's first mass-produced business computer dies aged 101

Maybe not, but back in the 1950s those systems sure did fly!

BOFH: Engage Hollywood Protocol – because nonsense always looks legit

A good one this week, loved the little twist at the end. Happy Friday!

Copilot+ PCs? Customers just aren't buying it – yet

A solution looking for a problem.

Even if you *do* use some AI tools, what can an "AI PC" do that you can't do with an online AI tool such as ChatGPT?

Until there is a clear functional use for these, customers will vote with their wallets.

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

Re: Dual SIM phone

Exactly this. Back when I was a techie, the listed mobile number for me was my work phone. I did not have Outlook or Teams on my personal phone, and when it came to home-time, my work phone was turned off. Once or twice I did get a query on a Monday morning "I was trying to reach you over the weekend", my response was simply "I'm not paid to be on-call and was out enjoying the weekend with my family".

We did used to have an on-call rota for a while - I was part of it. But then they ditched it after deciding it wasn't cost effective to pay people to be on-call over the weekend - and I was buggered if I was going to sacrifice my weekend without any pay for my trouble.

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Well they managed it back in 1995 OK. To be honest I just think it's laziness from Microsoft. Their telemetry will tell them that only 1% of users move the task bar (for example), so they can't be bothered to put the effort in to add the functionality back. They're too busy banging the Copilot drum instead, or thinking where else in the OS they can add some OneDrive adverts...

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

Re: Universities are the absolute worst for shadow IT

I worked at a University from 2006 to 2012 in IT. Our department ran its own IT systems, which actually meant I had a budget for PCs, a couple of servers to administrate, plus a remote NAS for backups (as well as a tape-safe for local ones). Was a fun job overall, but reading stories like this tells me why the department invested in their own IT instead of relying on the central facilities...

Microsoft, PC makers cut prices of Copilot+ gear in Europe, analyst stats confirm

Exactly this!

CD drives took off because they could hold massively more data than floppy disks, and provided much faster transfer rates too.

USB sticks took off because they also massively exceeded the capacity of floppy disks, and were easier to write to (and much smaller) than CDRWs.

3D Graphics cards took off because the resolution, quality and speed at which they could render games far surpassed what CPUs were capable of, so were rapidly adopted by gamers until they became pretty-much mandatory.

SSDs took off because your PC booted much faster with an SSD than a mechanical hard drive, and applications opened in a fraction of the time also. SSDs are now mandatory for a lot of newer AAA games.

AI PCs.... Nope, I got nothing....

Life lesson: Don't delete millions of accounts on the same day you go to the dentist

Re: "It was just another sentence"

And test it too. Spin up a test version of the system, ideally with a copy of some real data and then implement the change on the test system to see if it works properly. This should be the case for changes on any critical systems really, always have a test environment you can break and rebuild without impacting production.

The ultimate Pi 5 arrives carrying 16GB ... and a price to match

Re: Needs more processing power

Depends how that ripped DVD is being decoded. The Pi has hardware decompression capabilities, so will depend if VLC is using the hardware or just the main CPU. I use my Pi 4 as a media centre with Kodi and it can happily handle 1080p H265 videos without breaking sweat. Of course, Kodi is much more lightweight than a full Linux distro...