Posts by Annihilator

Bosses weren’t being paranoid: Remote workers more likely to start own biz

"Based on our firm-level estimate, we calibrate that at least 11.6 percent of the post-pandemic increase in new firm entry can be explained by spawning from remote work,"

For that to be a helpful stat, they would need to quantify how much of a post-pandemic increase there was. A million? 12? And even if they did that, anther way of putting it is 90% of the post-pandemic increase in new firm entry would have happened regardless.

I also know of a number of businesses that went under during Covid. Presumably a fair number of those started new businesses once things settled down - possibly even the same businesses.

So in summary, this report thinks that millions should be returning to an office location, just in case 3 people go off and start a business. Seems reasonable.

M365 apps on Windows 10 to get security fixes into 2028

They're not saying they'll patch W10 for 365 users, they're saying they'll patch Word that's running on an unsupported W10. Because they can't think of a (cheap/low-effort) method of denying that, particularly as some people may be paying for extended support on W10.

Much like they'll still be supplying patches for Office running on Win10 21H2 today - that went out of support a year ago.

Presumably only because it's too complicated for them to work out whether the underlying OS is in a supported/patched state (as mentioned in the article, there are ways to keep Win 10 supported past the deadline) and deny O365 patches. Or more likely, they've worked out it's not worth their time to develop such a check.

In other words, it's beneficial to users only because MS have deemed the alternative to not be beneficial to MS.

Microsoft moved the goalposts once. Will Windows 12 bring another shift?

The only 'benefit' I can see is that when my mother-in-law's PC dies, I now won't be able to easily recover the personal data from the storage device, because it'll be encrypted by the local TPM. And there's zero chance she'll have a copy of that key anywhere, because she won't know it exists.

Still. At least her spreadsheet of contacts and her pictures of the grandkids are "secure". That will come as some blessed relief to her.

Nvidia boss gets 45% pay bump, but is the billionaire happy?

Re: If anyone wonders about stock....

"That's how it should be, since that's how you're taxed if you bought a stock" - but if you bought a stock, you'd be buying it with income that had already been taxed, so yeah the "cap gain only" is a massive dodge. If Nvidia stock stays at the same price (it won't..), he'd effectively be getting his $50m absolutely tax free if/when he cashes them in (which he won't).

It's available to anyone who doesn't really need cash and is happier with equity. There's a reason his reward is so heavily biased towards stock - his cash salary ($1.5m) is effectively his petty cash to live. Everything else is equity in order to balance the debts he'll be raising for things like his house. He'll have a multi-million dollar house, but he'll have a massive interest-only mortgage on it effectively, writing that debt off against his other incomes. Look into it by all means, but will only really work if you don't need cash and have a business that has valued shares. Even then, it would need to be one that has significant volumes of shares, as those RSUs will have been created out of nothing, ultimately diluting the value of the existing shares, but not enough that anyone else would notice/care.

The irony is that these tax breaks are for people who don't need cash, they just don't want to pay tax. Holidays? Cars? Rich people don't need to buy them, they get given them as gifts and favours from other rich people. His holiday will be at a friend's island, on a private jet that's either Nvidia's (he'll work on this island partially, so it's a business trip) or another friend's.

Re: If anyone wonders about stock....

It says "stock awards" in the article for simplistic terms. But I've gone the trouble of checking the SEC filing it references:

https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001045810/000104581025000086/nvda-20250501.htm# (page 56 to save you reading it all).

They're actually Restricted Stock Units. Which are tax-free at the point of award, they only get taxed at the point of vestment. So the OP's point stands, it's accumulating wealth and assets without being taxed on it, and being able to use that as a tangible asset.

Trevor Noah summed it up nicely:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1_H7y9mOvw

Incidentally, incentive stock options aren't taxed at income tax rates, only at capital gain on the increase since you were awarded them. You might be subject to Alternative Minimum Tax depending on what their fair market value was at the time, but that's a very small tax by comparison.

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

Re: Windows 11 Cloud ?

I *think* they're saying the physical machine remains a Windows 10 device, but by renting the Cloud Win 11 device, you get the Windows 10 ESU mode thrown in for free (normally $61 for the first year) to keep the Windows 10 machine patched. I think.

But to summarise, you're renting a copy of Windows, while needing a copy of Windows to access said copy of Windows, because you can't run said copy of Windows..

Also not clear what happens if you remote desktop in to the physical machine from the cloud machine. I think it'll be like in Futurama when they had a box containing the entire universe.

Google goes cold on Europe: Stops making smart thermostats for continental conditions

Re: Again

"I don't have Google stuff myself - have hive and it's nightmares"

The challenge is, I didn't have Google stuff when I bought my Nest either - Google bought them. I assumed they would eventually discontinue them as soon as I saw that acquisition at the time, but didn't think they would effectively remove the whole product from the UK (and European) market. I've since moved to a property that can't use Nest (thermostats per-room) effectively, so have been off it for a while, but have a few friends who are now screwed.

It's a tricky balance. The life of a thermostat is probably 20+ years in the real world. But can you realistically expect a company to support a product for that length of time, keeping security updates rolling and the associated apps up to date and compatible with iOS26 or whatever we'll be up to by then?

As ever, the obvious solution would be to open-source the kit, but they never do that.

Tesla fudged odometer to screw me out of warranty, Model Y owner claims

Re: Cockup?

"GPS combined with accelerometer dead reckoning offers extremely high accuracy (see Kalman filter on Wikipedia). The accumulated error would be well below 1% per trip, making it more accurate than wheel rotation counting over several months."

When the Tesla's sitting on a tow-truck or a car transporter for example, the odometer moves then? But on a rolling road for an MOT test, the odometer doesn't move?

When Microsoft made the Windows as a Service pivot

"users looking glumly at hardware that is blocked from installing the latest Windows 11 update."

I assure you, as someone who has deliberately hamstrung my hardware (disabled TPM2.0), I am not looking glumly at it. I'm delighted I've come up with a seemingly foolproof method to stop MS sneaking Windows 11 onto my system.

No rest for the rocketry as NASA's Easter weekend heats up

Re: Go home musk

From memory, the "raw" output is about 3 times better - cars on average will convert around 20% of the potential from fuel into running the engine on average (it can peak at 50% in a really really efficient modern car, but rarely are the conditions, revs, gearing etc optimal) and the rest will be output as heat into the cooling systems. A power plant will do 60%. The losses in transmission isn't as high as people think - between 2 and 10% - so that power plant efficiency is still in the 55% zone.

Loss between battery and motor, won't be anything substantially different between the loss between engine and the wheels (horsepower vs brake horsepower). So yeah, it's still in the 2-3 times more efficient zone. You've also got the advantages of keeping the pollution in known places and treating it accordingly, rather than distributing it evenly through a metropolis.

Re: Electric Motors vs ICEs

Fair, but a saner plan than blithely tapping into a limited resource that will not get replenished (certainly not at the rate we consume) that's getting harder, riskier and more expensive to extract.

Ultimately I expect it's the market that will drive the shift, and equally solve your recycling problem. Right now, it's cheaper to just mine the battery materials, at some point recycling tech will improve to the point it's cheaper to harvest the material from dead cells. Or shift to a different battery tech, my money is still on hydrogen fuel cells, with refuelling done as a battery-swap at "petrol stations" and the dangerous refuelling part done en-masse, similar to how you buy BBQ gas. Similarly the markets will shift the energy sources as fossils become more expensive and green gets cheaper. I expect fossils are already prohibitively expensive, but are being masked by subsidies.

Re: Go home musk

That's my point - even if you didn't de-carbonise the grid, a fossil powered EV would *still* be more fuel efficient than an ICE vehicle for those reasons. Even Top Gear figured that out when they built an EV and strapped a generator to it because you can run the generator at its most efficient RPM constantly.

Congress wants to know if Nvidia superchips slipped through Singapore to DeepSeek

Assuming you bought them direct from Nvidia. Which no-one does. Nvidia don't make cards, they don't even make the chips, they get Samsung or TSMC to make them. Then companies like ASUS etc make cards.

And this is before we get to the complexity of where TSMC are manufacturing (and probably Samsung) the chips - Taiwan, with all the geopolitical intricacies of their relationship with China (coincidentally, their largest trading partner)

It also would presumably be pretty easy for the Chinese company to set up a Singaporean office and buy them from there. Or an entrepreneurial Singaporean (or other friendly nation) to become a reseller with international shipping... It's not clear to me how the US could punish a Singapore citizen after figuring out what was happening - presumably there are "don't sell this to China" conditions on any purchase (I've never checked), but equally what's to stop me buying an H100 based product in the UK for £30K from Scan, and selling it to Jeff Wong in Beijing for £40K?

Daddy of a mistake by GoDaddy took Zoom offline for about 90 minutes

User impact

Up to both users were apparently impacted...

Satellite phone tech coming to your mobe this year – but who pays for it?

Re: What is cheaper for the telco in rural areas ?

"They all like boasting what %age of the country that they cover"

They don't. They like boasting about what %age of the population they cover.

Re: This is What'll Happen

Broadly the same pattern followed with data and messaging.

From memory, my first SMS exchanges were "free", basically the phones exploiting the messaging capability that existed in the networks that the telcos hadn't really monetised.

Then BT Genie (O2 eventually?) launched an "all you can eat" SMS package around 2001/2002. So as a skint student, we leapt on that offer - until they realised just how much we'd use it rather than phone calls. I got a haughty email from them informing me that 3000 messages in a month was too many, and I'd be capped.

Similarly with data. Realised early on that I could use irda to link my old Nokia to a laptop and get very slow (but not hugely compared to dial-up, probably 14kbps compared to 50kpbs you'd get on a landline at the time?) internet access on the go and at home. Again, that worked for a while before they monetised it. Then offered all you can eat data plans. Then created caps once they realised just how much some people would use (probably around the Limewire/Kazaa/Morpheus/AudioGalaxy days - as I understand it anyway). And there we've stayed.

Windows 11 poised to beat 10, mostly because it has to

Re: How long...

What nag screens are you getting? At most I've got a bit of text on the left of the windows update page that says "click here to see if you're compatible with Win11".

Compared to the sh1tshow when I flashed my BIOS version and it reset the defaults, re-enabling TPM2. PC downloaded Win11 quick as a flash and was poised to install it automatically before I even blinked.

Re: How long...

Yeah, my Windows 10 machine as actually an upgraded Windows 7 Pro key, and I've no idea if it still qualifies for a fresh installation. I'm sure I'll find out in October when I can't be arsed to avoid the problem anymore.

Right now, I've just disabled TPM2.0 in the bios, which is enough to make Microsoft leave me alone with their surprise upgrades that they've tried in the past.

Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition

Re: hadn't been invented yet?

It was a doddle to disable from my memory. Even a simple approach for suppressing it on-demand by holding shift as you closed the drawer.

Re: hadn't been invented yet?

Add to that, in 1995 the idea of having a consumer-grade OS installed on a networked device was probably not front of anyone's mind. And as you say, it an installable option with Win95 (Winsock?)

Re: Windows 7 rose to the level

And Win95 went on to support USB with a service pack (poorly, from memory), or whatever they were called back then.

Ironically I've still got some USB to RS232 adaptors kicking around somewhere for when I need to talk serial to something. A rare enough event that the box probably has a lot of dust on it.

Re: Windows 7 rose to the level

"Bad Windows: [..] Original Win95 (no USB)"

You're dissing an operating system for not supporting a bus that hadn't been invented yet? You've set quite a high bar there.

I'm broadly on board with the rest of your list.

Windows 11 adds auto-recovery, kills offline setup loophole

"I said what about Apple? Again he just looked blank."

When was this, 1998?

Yeah I'm also wondering what level of Orwellian filter they're running to come up with a reason as to why they think using a Microsoft account is "more secure". And what level of security they think the average home user really needs.

Only one I can think of, they store a copy of the bitlocker key, so you can unlock it for whatever reason. But as I've posted previously, no idea what they think bitlocker is necessary for the average home user either.

Re: Return to sender

To be fair, every machine I've bought that had Windows S had it clearly labelled as such, and it was the work of seconds to disable it.

Re: Fun game

Christ alive that's unlocked a core memory. That was probably my first home internet experience on the family PC with a 1-month "free trial" (but, to my parent's and then my dismay, a billable phone number...) and working out that while it was connected, Netscape Navigator worked just fine and you weren't locked in to their little window.

The passive aggression of connecting USB to PS/2

Re: slap a keyboard ...

"PS/2 ports are notorious for not liking things plugged in (or removed) when they were powered on."

Yep, hence the "Keyboard missing, press F1 to continue" error.

Re: *!$#&@ Bluetooth

It's even more logical, as from memory if you booted without a keyboard into Windows for example, subsequently plugging a keyboard in once the system was up and running wouldn't be recognised and so there was no way to shut the machine down other than pulling the plug, and old systems didn't particularly cope well with that. The message was really saying "you've not plugged in a keyboard... sure you wanna do that?.."

If you wanted to run the machine headless, switching the error off in the BIOS was the way forward.

US Space Force warns Chinese satellites are 'dogfighting' in space

ICBMs

Maybe I'm mistaken, but don't ICBMs technically go into space as part of their launch profile? In which case, I'm assuming there's an exemption for those, as there's no way the US or Russia (or UK, India, France, North Korea, or Israel for that matter) would have signed up either.

Rocket Lab says NASA lacks leadership on Mars Sample Return

Size of problem

One thing I've often pondered, and never seen the maths on yet, but Mars is only about half the size of Earth. To launch anything significant into orbit from Earth needs a fairly BFR (Big Rocket), and I would assume that launching anything from Mars would need a rocket maybe a quarter the size if my fag-packet calculations are right. Assuming it's a Sputnik size launch from Mars, a rocket quarter the size/power of an Earth equivalent is still a multi-stage, 30-tonne rocket about 10m high - that in itself needs to be landed on Mars. I'm guessing my numbers must be way off, but right now I can't see any stories detailing what those engineering requirements might be.

The whole manned mission to Mars is an even larger problem.

Vodafone: Be in the office 8 days a month or lose bonuses

Re: Whats the alternative?

Well this is the thing, isn't it? The more companies tell me that I'm apparently not able to work effectively at home, the more I'll demonstrate that during snow days, strikes, etc. "Nope, sorry, can't work from home, or answer that email outside of core hours anymore"

Re: Be in the office 8 days a month

That's broadly what Google have mandated, no? "Be in the office *at least* every weekday" was the linked article.

SpaceX's 'Days Since Starship Exploded' counter made it to 48. It's back to zero again now

Re: Range Safety

It's hard to get reports out of it, I'm reading more and more that suggest it may have been auto-destructed once it sensed it was beyond flight limits. But from what I can tell, the last attempt self destructed:

https://www.spacex.com/updates/#flight-7-report

"Contact with Starship was lost prior to triggering any destruct rules for its Autonomous Flight Safety System, which was fully healthy when communication was lost. The vehicle was observed to break apart approximately three minutes after loss of contact during descent. Post-flight analysis indicates that the safety system did trigger autonomously, and breakup occurred within Flight Termination System expectations."

Range Safety

Every change that Starship was deliberately exploded. If the engines had failed and they lost control, one of the jobs of the Range Safety Officer is to remotely detonate the vehicle - it's safer for smaller fragments to disperse than it is for a massive ship coming down in one place.

You can see in the Challenger videos for example (and it wasn't heavily publicised at the time) but the RSO remotely detonated the SRBs after the explosion.

More Voyager instruments shut down to eke out power supplies

Re: Would it be possible ...

It's also that they're shutting down the less useful ones (or broken ones). So the cameras have long since been turned off (Pale Blue Dot being the last one taken) because there is naff all to see out there with a camera. Some of the instruments aren't working properly anymore either, or of limited value (the plasma flow detector stopped working on one, and didn't work well on another due to its orientation)

Oh Brother. Printer giant denies dirty toner tricks as users cry foul

Yes it's our fault Brother are such sh1ts isn't it? I'm guessing (probably incorrectly) that you were also championing Apple's views that if you just held the iPhone 4 in the correct manner, everything would be fine?

Microsoft's updated Windows battery indicator rollout runs out of juice

Re: Goals from the past

Maybe it's a config setting on my corporate laptop, but my battery icon in the bottom right shows a rough level in the icon, and hovering over it gives me percentage only. Previous windows versions gave me an estimated time too - I could even configure it to show estimated time persistently. I also don't get an estimate of how long it will take to charge when plugged in anymore.

My point is that this fantastic battery update they're trying (but failing) to roll out for Windows 11 was standard 25 years ago, and they're reinventing the wheel. Check the link I posted, that's what the icons used to look like, and they worked fine. Current Win11 is awful, and that's what they're trying to improve on - by bringing it back to the old Win2K/XP icon differentiation.

Goals from the past

Ah, remember when Windows XP already did that for you? I can't be bothered to delve into the file, but I'd bet batmeter.dll still has those icons available.

Also remember when you got an estimated battery life left? Granted it was always dependent on what you did, but was still a better indicator that the vague partially-shaded battery icon I get today.

https://ripitapart.com/2024/04/20/dispo-adventures-episode-1-reverse-engineering-and-running-windows-95-on-a-disposable-vape-with-a-colour-lcd-screen/winxp-original-battery-icons-4x/

Google binning SMS MFA at last and replacing it with QR codes

Re: Microsoft and Whatsapp

I'd imagine (hope) they only do it where they recognise a whatsapp recognised number, but the really annoying impact it's had is that iOS (and probably Android) helpfully offer to paste in texted/emailed codes automatically. It can't do that within Whatsapp.

Microsoft and Whatsapp

Does this explain why Microsoft have shifted their OTP texting authentication to Whatsapp instead of SMS? Or is that purely a cost saving... (I'm guessing the latter)

Rather than add a backdoor, Apple decides to kill iCloud encryption for UK peeps

Re: Location or Network or SIM

Changing app store is quite an involved process, but definitely better than what it used to be. I inadvertently had a US based account (having never lived there) with my first iTunes account which followed me to my Apple account when I first got an iPhone - resolving that was a nightmare from memory (nuke from orbit).

https://support.apple.com/en-mide/118283

Crucially though, as you say you need a US payment method.

Re: Alternatives to iCloud?

"The UK State already has legal power to demand user passwords to decrypt personal data upon demand. No US 5th Amendment rights here in the so called cradle (not) of democracy. Up to 5 years in the clink if you don’t play ball!"

I think the push was mostly for covert reviewing of data, but also in the instance where the criminal expired at the time of his crimes (think 7/7 as an example) and they couldn't decrypt their devices.

However I'm not sure this move will help them - it seems that iMessages and the like are still protected. It feels like this is a low-stakes move from Apple, as you point out, very few people were using it to begin with.

Elon Musk calls for International Space Station to be deorbited by 2027

Re: Conflict of Interest

Don't worry. They've both promised that Musk will identify any areas of self-interest and won't involve himself. I'm sure it'll be fine. There's no conflict of interest between the owner of SpaceX and NASA operations. None.

In all seriousness, as the owner of a major social media platform (Twittex), telecoms provider (Starlink), transport company (Tesla) and space (SpaceX), I can't see how there are any areas of government left that he can legitimately get involved in.

Re: Conflict of Interest

One thing that unnerves me about him (at a more basic level than, you know, everything he says or does) is his inability to laugh at jokes. You see it in some people from time to time, and it speaks to a sociopathic/psychopathic tendency from what I can tell, but it's really unsettling to watch once you've tuned into it.

You tend to find "nice" people who are generous with laughter at jokes and finding other people funny (deliberately funny that is, not laughing at others' misfortune) - a strong example of this are comedians like Miles Jupp and Jimmy Carr - they genuinely seem to delight in other people being funny. But Trump sits there stoically or grumpily, that the attention isn't on him.

Re: "There is very little incremental utility"

"I think Elon's desire is more about how having the station in orbit affects Starlink with the tens of thousands more satellites that he needs to get into LEO. That and if there is a push for a new station, he'd be able to scoop up some more money to keep SpaceX afloat without coming to the point where he'd have to put more of his own money in."

I don't doubt he's chasing it for his own self-interest, but why would the ISS affect Starlink?

Why did the Windows 95 setup use Windows 3.1?

Given Windows3.1 dialog boxes survived until Windows 10 (possibly 11?), it's unsurprising:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/l85hsx/windows_31_just_called_they_want_their_dialog_back/

Re: Marketing

Debunked several times over, Windows 95 wasn't "a GUI that sat on top of DOS"

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2024/11/19/chen_windows_95_setup/#c_4968643

NASA’s radiation tolerant computer lives up to its name after surviving Van Allen belts

Re: Slice of bread standards

Yeah fair enough, just hadn't seemed like the Van Allen belts were a significant blocker to any destination we'd decided on so far, but maybe it allows for more optimal trajectories.