I point you towards Muphry's Law
Posts by Mark #255
523 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired
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?
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linked to a front-facing camera that could read speed limit signs, but clearly had a "back-up" database, woefully out of date.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.
Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11
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
Garmin pulls a CrowdStrike, turns smartwatches into fancy bracelets
Words alone won't get the stars and stripes to Mars
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
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?
Hulk smash Musk and Zuck! Actor Mark Ruffalo and non-billionaire pals back network tech underpinning Bluesky
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?
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
We can clone you wholesale: Boffins build ML agents that respond like specific people
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
Three, Voda promise £10-a-month or below mobile tariffs in bid to sway CMA on merger
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
EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft
A very measured "this wouldn't have happened on Linux"...
"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
Meta won't train AI on Euro posts after all, as watchdogs put their paws down
Oracle Java police start knocking on Fortune 200's doors for first time
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
Support contract required techie to lounge around in a $5,000/night hotel room
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
Microsoft sends OneDrive URL upload feature to the cloud graveyard
How do you lot feel about Pay or say OK to ads model, asks ICO
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!"