Posts by Mark #255

US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired

I point you towards Muphry's Law

Paul McCartney, Elton John, other creatives demand AI comes clean on scraping

Re: Do it your way

absolutely, I say they should publish a silent album from 1000 artists. That'll make the news.

Open Document Format turns 20, but Microsoft Office still reigns supreme

Re: That UK Gov Manadate thing

What?

LibreOffice for Macs is absolutely available.

You can even pay £9 to get it from Apple's app store.

As for iPads, there's Collabora Office. Their Android version is fine.

Users hated a new app – maybe so much they filed a fake support call

Mitigations are available, though. I can display it on a big 4k TV for planning purposes. And in the field, my phone* has several advantages over a paper map: it's more weatherproof, it doesn't blow away in a gale, and it has a very useful you-are-here dot.

* BTW, it's really hard to get a phone screen under 6 inches - the last one I had measuring 4 inches was from 2011!

OK, Google: Are you killing Assistant and replacing it with Gemini?

In-car use?

Android Auto only accepts voice input while the vehicle is moving. Requiring a subscription for that might (one hopes) raise eyebrows at consumer rights regulators...

Cheap 'n' simple sign trickery will bamboozle self-driving cars, fresh research claims

"last week^h^h^h^h decade it was a 60"

A few years ago I was driving a hired Passat, with a fancy-pants "smart" cruise control which was supposedly linked to a front-facing camera that could read speed limit signs, but clearly had a "back-up" database, woefully out of date.

One section of road had been changed from derestricted to 40 about 10 years before. The Passat got to that point and deployed the loud pedal, despite the 40 repeater sign and the stream of cars in front of me.

Microsoft tells abandoned Publisher fans to just use Word and hope for the best

Re: LO Draw

Apparently LO Writer can do that.

LO Draw

Libre Office Draw is what I've always used. I did conference posters, at not-quite-A0 size, over a decade ago, and was tech support when my wife needed the same a couple of years back.

They've even got text flowing within arbitrary shapes now (not that I ever wanted that...)

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Presumably people who want to rearrange the taskbar sit almost completely in the Venn circle of people who have switched off telemetry...

Re: There is no reason for Windows 11

We have half a dozen rugged Dell laptops (carry handle, corner protection, and IP-enough to survive an English shower), from around 2017. They're all still perfectly functional, but only one is young enough to meet Win11 requirements.

I can't see the request to spend ~£10k replacing the five older ones going down well...

Microsoft vet laments a world where even toothbrushes need reboots

Re: The term bootstrapping, or booting for short ...

I have vague memories of a novel (possibly Alistair MacLean?) where the protagonist had a fall while rock climbing, and ended up dangling in free air at the end of the rope, due to an overhang. He boot-strapped back up the rope to eventually regain the cliff face to continue his climb.

AI revoir, Lucie: France's answer to ChatGPT paused after faux pas overdrive

Re: What is a language model without knowledge?

I'm reminded of the (in?)famous sentence:

"Colorless* green ideas sleep furiously"

* Chomsky is American, so I'll keep his spelling

Garmin pulls a CrowdStrike, turns smartwatches into fancy bracelets

The point of the smart watch is (supposedly) that it does the counting for you.

Grrrr.

Words alone won't get the stars and stripes to Mars

Re: "serious radiation for weeks if not months on the round trip"

1m/s² (which is about what trains aim for) for 3 million seconds (or just shy of 35 days).

UK businesses eye AI as the cheaper, non-whining alternative to actual staff

Re: > you want to starve people to death

Okay, for the avoidance of doubt, I think all workers should be paid at least the National Living Wage.

Your turn, @codejunky.

Do you think they should have been paid for their (output-less) day?

It's a simple question, requiring either yes (x)or no as a reply.

You seem to be afraid of giving a straightforward answer.

Re: > you want to starve people to death

I'm struggling to understand why you're avoiding answering the question. One last try, @codejunky.

Should they have been paid for their (output-less) time, or not?

Re: > you want to starve people to death

I'll give you another chance, @codejunky, to answer the specific question.

What would your preference be?

Should they have been paid for their (output-less) time or not?

Re: > you want to starve people to death

My eldest is currently working on building sites in their year out before Uni.

Last week they wasted a day: travelling to site, waiting for the H&S officer to decide it wasn't safe to work, then travelling home.

Tell me, @codejunky, should they have been paid a day's wages, or nothing, because no output was produced?

Re: > you want to starve people to death

If a business model is only profitable because it fails to pay its workers adequately, it deserves to be removed from the marketplace.

Hulk smash Musk and Zuck! Actor Mark Ruffalo and non-billionaire pals back network tech underpinning Bluesky

Re: Nobody's mentioning the Mastodon in the room

Mastodon is mentioned only in passing, and nowhere does the (fine) article provide any counterpoint to the AT press release.

To reiterate: Mastodon/ActivityPub does all this already; but Free Our Feeds is apparently suffering from NIH.

Tesla recalls 239,382 vehicles over rearview camera problems

A while ago Audi would sell you an e-tron with cameras instead of wing mirrors, but I haven't seen them recently.

Many HGVs on the roads in the UK have tiny wing cameras instead of mirrors.

Having done several trips to the tip (sorry, Household Waste Recycling Centre) last week with the rear view through the car blocked by a huge bag of brambles etc, it was slightly surprising how much I missed being able to see behind me.

Short-lived bling, dumb smart things, and more: The worst in show from CES 2025

Re: Nobody asked for this...

I checked our Kobo account, it now stands at over 500 titles; we don't have enough space in the house for the extra bookshelves that would be required.

Fortunately there are certain Calibre plugins that enable one to ensure there's a local copy available, should anything untoward happen to the Other Entity's Servers that provide the convenience...

Re: Map software

Some map software on phones/tablets is excellent, away from Google.

OSMand+ is amazing (over a decade ago I bought both the software and its contour plugin in a sale for about £12.

It shows you contours and/or hillshading; you can plan routes (with on-device path-finding) just by tapping points along the way, then export GPX files to a smart watch, or use them on the phone.

About 10 years ago I climbed Ben Nevis and found it invaluable; even though it was June, there was snow at the top, and then low cloud meant that visibility was maybe 15m, so the last section to the summit was phone out, making sure I didn't stray from the (invisible) path.

And last year, building up to my first 100km cycle ride, it was incredibly useful to be able to plot a series of steadily lengthening cycle routes, send them to my watch, and have the Garmin software on the phone call out directions from the bottom of the handlebar bag.

John Deere boasts driverless fleet - who needs operators, anyway?

Re: As a farmer/rancher ...

mayham, noun:

Unexpected pig in the combine harvester

HMD Fusion: A budget repairable smartphone with modular flair

nanny-ing software

The issue I have with HMD's output is its approach to what it thinks should be running on your phone/tablet.

I have an HMD tablet, and SWMBO has a phone, and Signal, and media apps get closed/suspended in the background, so messages don't arrive reliably for her, and I can't set an album playing without it cutting out after 10 minutes or so.

And yes, I have changed the battery management setting to the least restrictive mode for all apps mentioned; but HMD [thinks it] knows better.

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Re: Close enough

I've written memory management code for a real project just once, and even I know that reallocations to increase pool size should go geometrically (so if 50 kB isn't enough, allocate 100 kB, then 200 kB, etc)

We can clone you wholesale: Boffins build ML agents that respond like specific people

poor odds

So it's a D&D game where every turn you roll a D6, and if you roll a 1, some random person gets to decide what "you" would do.

I wouldn't want that in a game, let alone anything important enough in real life that had my name attached to it.

The horror that is VHS revived for horror movie release

DVD rot

DVD rot is a thing, and I've lost a couple of discs to it.

It's often a manufacturing issue, so one title I have is notoriously prone: both the original disc and its replacement (bought shrink-wrapped from a reputable place) have visible degradation of the metallic layer.

Fortunately I was able to rip the disc using a solution found online: immerse the disc in a detergent solution, dry it and immediately rip, before the water dries out from the metal layer.

This works because the cause of the DVD rot in this case was a lack of sealing at the edge of the disc; over time, the metal layer corrodes. The detergent solution allows water to penetrate, which (briefly) gives sufficient reflection of the laser beam. However, long-term this just accelerates the rot, hence the requirement to rip the disc: the procedure preserves the data, not the physical disc.

Brits hate how big tech handles their data, but can't be bothered to do much about it

Re: Time to mention Consent-o-Matic again

I came here to mention this - there are versions for Chrome and Firefox (even works on Firefox mobile!)

Three, Voda promise £10-a-month or below mobile tariffs in bid to sway CMA on merger

Re: Chancers

retail mobile tariffs at £10 or below for at least two years after their proposed merger

Yes, I read that and was reminded of the scene in Maverick where Mel Gibson's character sits down at a table to play cards, promising he won't win a hand for the first hour.

Re: Smarty can get in the bin

As you say, coverage is very location dependent.

I managed for a month on Smarty at home (4G router in the loft), which could *just* cope with 2 people WFH, but gaming was iffy in the extreme.

Smarty switch off unused SIMs after 8 or 9 months, with reminder emails in good time - I don't know anyone who lets you keep a spare SIM active in a drawer without paying for it.

Fingers crossed that it remains this way.

FTC urged to stop tech makers downgrading devices after you've bought them

Re: Squeezebox / sonos

I bought a pair of nice B&W speakers, and a NAD amplifier, in 1993 (ish). The set-up still provides the sound in our lounge, with a TV, RPi/MoodeAudio and an HTPC plugged into it.

Not going anywhere near anything smart that becomes dumb when the server's owner decides so.

'Error' in Microsoft's DDoS defenses amplified 8-hour Azure outage

DNOs do care

In the UK at least, the Distribution Network Owners require large-enough customers to sign agreements regarding power quality and balance.

HVAC is something that could easily be (seen to be) big enough to cause upset, especially if the paperwork's been lost

EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft

A very measured "this wouldn't have happened on Linux"...

Matthew Garrett on Mastodon:

"Linux would have prevented this!" literally true because my former colleague KP Singh wrote a kernel security module that lets EDR implementations load ebpf into the kernel to monitor and act on security hooks and Crowdstrike now uses that rather than requiring its own kernel module that would otherwise absolutely have allowed this to happen, so everyone please say thank you to him

Fresh programmer's editor on Linux lies Zed ahead

Re: Oh, Hell, NO

Well, at least it wasn't

sudo curl https://zed<dot>dev/install.sh | sh

Meta won't train AI on Euro posts after all, as watchdogs put their paws down

Re: Claims versus what they do

I wonder what they'll do with my daily Wordle* score...

* Other daily word quizzes are available

Oracle Java police start knocking on Fortune 200's doors for first time

Re: Do Azul actually know what they're talking about?

The PoS devices might belong to legally separate entities (franchises or something like that), maybe?

Meta will use your social media posts to train its AI. Europe gets an opt out

Re: Unable to object

The code did arrive for me, but I was struck by how difficult a process it was: notice the notification, realise that there was a route to object, find that the link didn't work on mobile, think up an objection, remember the email address I'd given them, get the code, enter the code. (Possibly the email address you'd given didn't match what they already had.)

Almost as if they were intent on making the opt-out process as difficult (and brittle) as possible

Google to push ahead with Chrome's ad-blocker extension overhaul in earnest

Re: "users will gradually be warned the end is near"

Sure, but have you seen what the internet looks like these days without an ad blocker. It is completely unusable.

I occasionally get to see friends and colleagues browse to something they want to show me, through an unfiltered browser. I'm flinching, but they're oblivious.

I've gently suggested uBlock Origin (to no avail); maybe it's like kerning, where it's only once uneven letter spacing has been pointed out to you do you start noticing it everywhere...

Thanks for coming to help. No, we can't say why we called – it's classified

Re: 1 in a million scenario

The last PC I built (Ryzen 5500, so quite recent) really surprised me when I did the first power-up (case open, obviously) and was rewarded with a cycling RGB LED lightshow from the motherboard! I'd overlooked that line of the spec sheet. Since it was going into a windowless case, I looked for the off setting in the BIOS.

Parliamentarians urge next UK govt to consider ban on smartphones for under-16s

Re: Here's a thought...

My kid (now doing A-levels) has been taught online security (to a reasonably competent degree) since primary school.

Also, don't forget that for a significant percentage of 2020, school lessons were online only.

Support contract required techie to lounge around in a $5,000/night hotel room

Humph. The best I've managed is York to Kings Cross and back (1st class seats are nice though)

Microsoft gets new Windows boss as Start Menu man Parakhin 'to explore new roles'

I'm looking at the Win10 start menu. It has an alphabetic list of programs (some in folders), it has a configurable space where you can group stuff to your heart's content, and if you start typing it searches for you.

The annoying thing about search is that it's hard to confine the search space to the PC (and they keep changing the sodding registry key), but, having just used a Windows 7 PC the other week, the Windows 10 start menu is much improved.

Firefox 124 brings more slick moves for Mac and Android

And to add another anec-datapoint, about:memory reports to me that Firefox (123.0.1) on Windows (10) is using 40.5MB for the Register article.

Microsoft sends OneDrive URL upload feature to the cloud graveyard

Re: Resilio Sync

Resilio sync has an Android client (for a couple of years)

How do you lot feel about Pay or say OK to ads model, asks ICO

Sir Humphrey wrote the survey

I filled in the survey and it's unhelpful if (like me) you'd like "pay or ok" schemes to be nuked from orbit.

University chops students' Microsoft 365 storage to 20GB

Re: OneDriving Me Up The Wall

I promise I'm not trying to start a "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch...

I worked for a university a few years ago, and erroneously got put on a "this person has left, begin $LIST_OF_IT_ACTIONS" list at one point.

Fortunately(!), the first of these actions was to tell me I had 48 hours to save any emails I wanted to since that was how long I had before BIG RED BUTTON time.

Afterwards, they said that part of it was ensuring that foo@[uni].ac.uk addresses weren't abused by folk pretending to be still academic-adjacent.

UK public sector could save £20B by swerving mega-projects and more, claims chief auditor

Re: "complicated"

I remember giving up trying to claim the Pandemic/WfH allowance for office equipment after the 4th or 5th not-quite-in-agreement gov.uk web page telling me how simple it was.

And further back, we gave up trying to get tax relief on childcare because step one was, effectively, "specify how much you'll spend on childcare in the next year - no conferring!"

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

"speach"

Depends on the language, obviously: "speach" is Gàidhlig for "wasp"

CEO arranged his own cybersecurity, with predictable results

Re: Shameful confession time:

For bonus points, "bet you thought there was a password here, huh?" is could be your pass-phrase.