Posts by A. Coatsworth

DoJ wants Google to sell off Chrome and ban it from paying to be search default

Re: My choice

>>I understand the risks involved

You are an exception, as is most of the people who frequent these forums. This is not an accurate representation of how the average person uses internet.

>>I am sensible with what I share online

You are doubly an exception here. I commend you for that. The problem is that the vast majority of internet users don't even know that there are risks associated to what they share, much less that there are options beyond Google. For them. one day the blue e stopped being "the internet" and instead the colorful circle became that.

Alphabet has a virtual monopoly over the way people access the internet. This goes beyond the information they may have about any individual, and this kind of monopolies are never healthy.

NB: I am not one of the downvoters.

Europe glances Russia's way after Baltic Sea data cables severed

Re: Why would they bother?

>>ps.. what is it with El Reg and conspiracy theorists these days?

Well, you _do_ have a Silver Badge, so it seems conspiracy theorists have been here for a long time...

Data broker amasses 100M+ records on people – then someone snatches, sells it

Re: How to punish these guys

YES

Clues to Windows Intelligence found in Windows 11 builds

Re: Angry ladies with sponge cakes and scones.

Perhaps a change of name to "Windows Inclusive Intelligence", which would force Nintendo to release the hounds...

Their battle would be LEGENDARY

Your air fryer might be snitching on you to China

Re: Dumb

Checked one of their TVs at random. It has Component *and* Composite inputs... Almost brought a tear to my eye.

Now, I need to find out if they are available in this forsaken piece of land.

Toyota and Joby complete Japan's first air taxi flight test

Re: Solution in search of a problem?

You can throw all the redundancy you want at the machines, they will only be as safe as the pilot at the helm[1]. If this is massified, the barrier of entry will be lowered, meaning underpreprared people will be flying these things over densely populated places, which does not sound appealing.

[1] No mention in the note of how the test was piloted, but I'd hope no one is mental enough to try and put to production a fully automated deathflying machine

US Army should ditch tanks for AI drones, says Eric Schmidt

Well, he wants to get rid of the "tank" part, perhaps because he successfully got rid of the "think" a long time ago...

Microsoft accuses Google of creating a lobbying front called 'Open Cloud Coalition'

Re: Pot calling the kettle black

You just know the more indignant the answer from a company (or Nation-State) to an activity, the more likely they are engaging in the very same activity

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

We all knew LLMs are basically GIGO, but this is ridiculous!

Huawei's farewell to Android isn't a marketing move, it's chess

Re: Remember The 1960's British Motorcycle Story?

With the difference that the Japanese bikes were objectively better.

Swapping Apple/Google with a locked Huawei environment would be like leaving 1984 for Brave New World! (other dystopias available for comparison)

$180 for an overpriced, dubious SSD drive? Maybe don't join the USB Club

>> inform your friends about whatever you publish

Phrases like this make me roll my eyes so hard I actually see my own thoughts... FOMO is really a mental health epidemic.

Nvidia CEO whines Europeans aren’t buying enough GPUs

"AI arms dealer says"

Not much to add to the discussion, just please buy a pint (or 10) to the sub-head writer for calling it as it is.

Tesla, Intel, deny they're the foreign company China just accused of making maps that threaten national security

Stalinism is based on paranoia, and it is the last remnant of communist ideology left in the CCP.

Richard Branson to take balloon ride to edge of space

Re: How much helium will we need

What? Are you telling me that Hans Pfall was not a documentary?!

AWS boss: Don't want to come back to the office? Go work somewhere else

>> a stark contrast to the "nine out of ten" workers Garman said he had spoken with who supported the policy

Which simply means he used to have a cohort of 10 sycophants who shielded him from the real world, and now he has nine.

Windows 7 finally checks out as POSReady 7 closes the till on an era

And why did you feel the need to avoid the joke?

Even if it were incredibly telegraphed, it wouldn't be any less funny... and MS deserves all the mockery it can get

WeChat devs introduced security flaws when they modded TLS, say researchers

Re: NewDNS

...NewSpeak?

Compression? What's that? And why is the network congested and the PCs frozen?

I've said it before and I'll repeat it now: "Reply all" email storms are one of the most magnificent spectacles of nature!

They tell a lot about the infrastructure of the affected organization, and say a lot more about the psyche of the people who go out of their way to reply all telling other people *not* to reply all, and of those who unleash the most outlandish threats against the people involved.

Whenever something like this happens (less frequently now than in days of yore) I can abandon all I am doing to monitor the incoming emails, reading and laughing at the answers, and noticing how the network starts to buckle under the load.

Fun for all ages indeed

Hold my Pimms! Wimbledon turns to tech for line-ball calls

Re: Drones!

>> automated drone based ball recovery system

"No! Not those balls! Turn it off! TURN IT OFF!"

[agonized scream]

"We should not have tested it at the gentlemen championship"

If Dell's Qualcomm-powered Copilot+ PC is typical of the genre, other PCs are toast

Re: the touchpad – another matte expanse without visual or tactile clues about its extent

"Usabillity"? nobody gives a fart in a hurricane about usability.

It looks good[1] and that is the only thing that matters! Just ask Apple!

^{[1]For specific values of "good". This one in particular looks like the death-by-boredom "Flatland" look of Windows, come to the 3rd dimension}

Two British-Nigerian men sentenced over multimillion-dollar business email scam

Re: CALL 419 NOW!

As long as you DON'T REDEEM

oops, sorry. Wrong scam!

Two years after entering the graphics card game, Intel has nothing to show for it

Re: Approach

Upvoted! but the mixture of imperial and metric threw a wrench into my head.

So, to ensure compatibility, it would be changing the temperature from -0.5 Hilton to 0.5 Hilton, for a room of 0.2236 nanoWales in 0.0009 Truss.

Did you hear the one about the help desk chap who abused privileges to prank his mate?

Re: Early days

NWO? Those pesky Illuminati were trying to hide their actions with the autocorrect!

Amazon CEO wants his staff back in the office full time

>>They seem to think that nobody will notice, but they're wrong

So, someone is noticing but nothing is done in those specific cases? That is a problem, alright, and is not just the employees...

Biden tackles trade loophole used by cheap Chinese e-tailers

Re: Caught by the headline

And yet the US is not doing (much) worse than in previous years, which shows how much power the president actually wields, and highlights how the elections are little more than bread and circus

Japan to put a small red Swedish house on the Moon

Re: Spelling nazi here...

Incidentally, "Moskva" is a lot closer to the original russian Москва, than the rendition in most European languages

Re: "a small red house on the surface of the Moon"

Given that you can sell an inexistent sculpture for $18K, I'd say tha it is worth more if no one sees it, because f*** me if I understand modern art

BOFH: The Boss is right, the applications of AI are truly staggering

Worse, he went against a BoFH when booze money was on the line!

>>"Then you won't mind spending half an hour in my office while I spend half an hour in yours?"

Ha! the boss fell victim to one of the classic blunders.

NASA's solar sailing spacecraft is tumbling – but that's part of the plan

Re: How do you steer such a craft?

In space, no one can hear you (whistle for wind)

Defense AI models 'a risk to life' alleges spurned tech firm

Re: "Simply put, US DoD algorithmic warfare models are not fit for purpose and pose a risk to life,"

I wouldn't worry: it will hallucinate any old string to pass as the nuclear code, and will double down on it being correct after the human users inform that the enemy land failed to turn into a vitrified parking lot.

White House seizes 32 domains, issues criminal charges in massive election-meddling crackdown

Re: May I be the first to say ...

Actually, yes. It is a sound strategy: If a troll yells bullcrap in the forest and no one hears him, does he get paid?

NASA confirms who is flying and who is not on SpaceX Crew Dragon

There are several noises I'd prefer not to hear inside my spaceship, including this one that the word "Boeing"

FTFY

What is missing from the web? We're asking for Google

Re: My starter for 10

>> an internet without Google Doubleclick.

Google actually did no evil back in the day. Its adquisition of Doubleclick[1] is the root of most, if not all, the current internet woes

[1] Or rather the parasitic takeover of Google by the mad men

Feds claim sinister sysadmin locked up thousands of Windows workstations, demanded ransom

Re: "now faces up to 35 years behind bars"

>>like armed robbery, child molesting or murder

For those? Death penalty.

Death penalty is not -and has never worked as- deterrent, but the people who engage in those crimes is not fit to live in a society and should not be kept alive at the expense of one.

Microsoft Bing Copilot accuses reporter of crimes he covered

>>That statement was a mistake on our part and is hereby retracted

Ha! Micros~1 admitting a mistake? and doing the right thing afterwards? Now you are hallucinating!

The Windows Control Panel joins the ranks of the undead

Re: "Why did MS even consider getting rid?"

I never read anyone commenting about this, but the name change from older versions' "My PC" to Win10 "This PC" is a good example of this insidious trend

Missing scissors cause 36 flight cancellations in Japan

Cue Benni Hill music...

Stargazing with the Beaverlab Finder TW2

Re: Planet X

Well, you can't argue against that: the Moon is one of the brightest and nearest objects in the sky!

Inevitable xkcd

Disney claims agreeing to Disney+ terms waives man's right to sue over wife's death

Re: The negligent Manslaughter aspect aside...

I always thought the most humillating part was the infamous communal underwear

If a cheesy '80s flick is a good metaphor for how you run projects, something is wrong

Did you see anyone beheading the geese? No?

There you have it!

Google brings more Gemini AI features to Android, saves the best for Pixel 9

The US Dept of Justice is reportedly mulling seeking the break-up of Google to combat its monopolies

As the memetic scene goes:

Don't do that. Don't give me hope

Intel's processor failures: A cautionary tale of business vs engineering

Re: "underinvestment in critical manufacturing technologies"

A quick DDG tells me Lord Gaben is still the president. The proof of the pudding will be after he retires, if Harry Ellis takes the reins.

BOFH: The true gravity of the Boss and the 3-coffee problem

Re: Coffee? Kindergarten?

I was always the perfect teacher's pet, so not sure what, if anything, the coffee did to me back then

The concoction kids used to drink back then was the famed latinamerican Café con Leche (coffee with milk): half drip coffee (strong), half hot milk, and lots of sugar...

The third ingredient may make it an even more interesting topic for your cousin!

Drinking my third (or fourth?) mug of the day -and feeling my guts completely at peace- I can't help but wonder:

What in the unholy name of Nestle is sold as "coffee" over there ?

Coffee-shits is a well known internet meme, but it is something I have never experienced or heard about in the real world. And I say this as someone who literally[1] drinks coffee since Kindergarden

_{[1] and by "literally" I do mean it: my mother prepared me a little thermos with coffee for snack time}

Report: Tech misconceptions plague the IT world

>>I'm not sure why that would be.

My take is that it is a generation that has an insanely powerful computer basically glued to their hand almost since birth, and (in the eyes of older generations) can do wondrous things with it.

So, spending a lot of time online must correlate to technical knowlegede of what they are doing.. right? RIGHT?

It's not like people grow up thinking of the likes of Google as benevolent Santa Claus who give us amazing doodles without asking anything in return

Legal eagles target Intel for class action over cooked Raptor Lake CPUs

A law firm is inviting owners [...] to join in on an upcoming class action lawsuit

Yeah!

Sign in here to help this law firm[1] to reap $$Millions out of Intel for themselves, and perhaps get the chance to have a few cents thrown your way.

_{[1] I'd call them "vultures" but that would be an insult to the important role carrion-birds play in the ecosystems... oh, and to this rag too}

Microsoft remains massively profitable, investors await AI payoff

Re: A New World

XP SP2 was all right

The original XP launch was a dumpster fire of epic proportions

BOFH: Well, we did tell you to keep the BitLocker keys safe

Atlanta?

Ok, so the reason why the BOFH wants to go to Belgium is clear (and abundantly discussed above)

But why going to Atlanta?

(honest question: the only thing I can think of related to Atlanta is Coca Cola...)

Re: "You are confusing Belgian chocolate with American "chocolate""

And at leats 15% butyric acid, for that delicious vomit aftertaste!