* Posts by Dan 55

17368 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

UK unveils roadmap for replacing animal testing

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Bizarre

It's just the current government finding excuses to sticking whatever nonsense is currently being peddled as AI in everything:

All schools in England to be given AI-generated pupil attendance targets

It would make more sense for government to put its faith in a bingo machine as it would be less biased:

Revealed: bias found in AI system used to detect UK benefits fraud

Dan 55 Silver badge
Coat

You wouldn't download a car

You wouldn't 3D print an animal.

EU's reforms of GDPR, AI slated by privacy activists for 'playing into Big Tech’s hands'

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: cookie banner

We don't have the Do Not Track flag any more, now we have the Global Privacy Control flag, in spite of DNT being legally recognised in Germany.

A few years from now that'll be removed and something else which does the same thing will be invented, and with all the messing about (new setting, implement client side, implement on servers, new legal backing) the uptake will be low which is the intention.

De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Way too many

Because MacOS and Windows have never got their knickers in a twist before and you've never seen any sneering on Apple's or MS' forums.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Apologies, the 'send corrections' button doesn't seem to be working...

The author wrote Windows 95 but was really thinking of the Commodore Amiga (released in 2007-22).

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "Imagine if instead of Vim, we had 23 different Vi clones"

Seems the first vi was written by a student at Berkley (Bill Joy) and nvi was also written by a student at Berkley (Steve Kirkendall) -> source

It was remiss of me not to look on texteditors.org in the first place...

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

Only Microsoft can release Outlook for Unix/Linux.

If they don't, you could log into OWA with a browser. New Outlook and OWA are practically at parity because they're both web apps (fine for web mail, terrible for a desktop app).

Dan 55 Silver badge

"Imagine if instead of Vim, we had 23 different Vi clones"

We almost do:

vi Clones

Also neovim, qe, and some others which are vi modes in GUI software.

UK asks cyberspies to probe whether Chinese buses can be switched off remotely

Dan 55 Silver badge

"UK importer says supplier complies with the law"

I have in my hand a piece of paper...

US taxpayers being kept in the dark over datacenter subsidies

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Dark?

They're also paying ICE for performative cruelty.

Big Tech's control freak era is breaking itself apart

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Open source is not a magic bullet.

Open source distros are now bloated, lack backwards compatibility...

There's still some up for the challenge:

Can a Pentium 1 Run MODERN Desktop Linux?

(I have no idea about Tiny Core's politics.)

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "Open source is the ticket out of here." Etc

So here we are, where myself and plenty of others have patched known bugs in systems we use every day, could release those patches for the benefit of all, but are being told explicitly not to do that because the company would see that as us "giving away their property".

Yet the company has probably already given it away because they've uploaded everything to Azure. If not yours then most. And now it's been fed into Copilot and subject to the whims of the Trump administration (access cut, corporate espionage) and hostile state actors.

Dan 55 Silver badge

This article was timely

Seeing that MS has just announced this:

Microsoft teases agents that become ‘independent users within the workforce’

Seems there's no end to the tulip mania.

Who's watching the watchers? This Mozilla fellow, and her Surveillance Watch map

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Fear of speaking

For a country of approximately 70 million, at least 2.45 million people would need to demonstrate.

In 2003, the UK had a population of approximately 60 million people, and the 750,000-1 million who demonstrated in the Iraq war protests was not enough to bring about change. It would have had to have been at least 2.1 million people according to that rule.

Secret setting hints haptic feedback coming to Windows 11 UI

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Devil's advocate

Perhaps useful for the partially blind?

Intel CTO and AI boss quits to join OpenAI after just six months in the job

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: OpenAI [is] losing billions each quarter

A lot of reports are based on press releases promising to give each other similar boatloads of money some time in the future (i.e. they haven't shoved anything at anyone yet). I doubt that's enough to prop up an economy.

AI slop hits new high as fake country artist goes to #1 on Billboard digital songs chart

Dan 55 Silver badge

We've had a good couple of years of AI slop playlists on Spotify and YouTube for people who don't care what music they're listening too as well so it was just a matter of time before an AI slop band reached number 1.

Microsoft teases agents that become ‘independent users within the workforce’

Dan 55 Silver badge
Mushroom

AI isn't a bubble, it's an iceberg

Looking forward to Microsoft to hitting it and sinking without trace.

Here's one way to cut support ticket volume… send them to another company entirely

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

As usual, it's Microsoft's* fault

All Microsoft business lines have to hit a 30% profit margin and Copilot is mandatory everywhere in the company so closing support tickets with an AI slop answer and and automated e-mail responses for PR enquiries is the result.

* Obsidian Entertainment was bought by Xbox Game Studios in 2018. Everything Xbox Game Studios touches turns to crap (it's worth reading, it rips into MS' hopeless inept management).

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Yet another Windows vs macos comparison....

MacOS and Windows are both on yearly major releases and both have public testing. The quality of MacOS is also leaving something to be desired lately too. Perhaps you just can't cram new features and respond adequately to a flood of bug reports often written by people who have no real expertise in writing them and release on a marketing-driven yearly schedule.

Famed software engineer DJB tries Fil-C… and likes what he sees

Dan 55 Silver badge
Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "C (and C++)"...

Obligatory watch for anyone who wants to C++ify a C codebase (Matt Godbolt, 1 hour 35 minute talk).

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Interesting article, thanks!

It would be nice to have comments on DevClass, lots of possibilities for geeky language debates, but I guess you don't want to take on more moderation.

That said, it would only be a problem when Rust fanatics deliberately and maliciously conflate C and C++, their use cases, and their functionality. ;)

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Type checking and compatibility

Booleans were a C99 addition, weren't they?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Type checking and compatibility

TRUE, FALSE, UNINITIALIZED, and ERROR

But having that for boolean, wouldn't you want it for the rest of the types too and if so, how would you implement it?

Wouldn't it be clearer to just have some special return code enum for all functions and not mix it with boolean?

Game on! Penguin levels up as Linux finally cracks 3% on Steam

Dan 55 Silver badge

If we're talking stats, I don't see Linux desktop use by country disproportionately high in Canada, US, UK, Oz, NZ compared to the worldwide value but I do see it high in India at 6% which is double the worldwide average.

If anecdotal evidence counts, I've heard there a lot of sites which are full of English IT book PDFs on websites which aren't English speaking countries...

Dan 55 Silver badge

I suspect many non-English Linux users work in IT or have an interest in it and who install the OS in English because they can speak it, English is still the language of IT, and they'd rather not put up with a patchwork of software which is in English only or half or poorly translated into their native language, in spite of there also being software which has been properly translated into their native language (Firefox, LibreOffice...).

It would have been better to break it down by country, if that data is available.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Proton is the hero here

So much so that people are installing Bazzite on the Asus "Xbox" Ally to get some performance out of the handheld.

Say it with me: Windows is the problem with Windows handhelds

Bazzite fixes the Xbox Ally and shames Windows yet again.

OpenAI's Altman and Friar walk back remarks about federal loan guarantees

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: What’s the money for

5. Every investor knows this is bullshit but they think they're clever enough to know exactly when the music is going to stop and they'll get their investment back and more just before that happens. Of course they're not clever enough to know when this will happen, it's just more casino economics.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Alert

Wow, this is going quick

We're already talking about bailing out OpenAI. I wasn't expecting that till next year.

Looking forward to reading what Ed Zitron and David Gerard have to say.

Microsoft will force its 'superintelligence' to be a 'humanist' and play nice with people

Dan 55 Silver badge
Angel

Re: Last attempt

Only Microsoft has the special secret prompt that will make it a benevolent AI. Their highly skilled prompt engineers have been working on this problem for weeks.

Rideshare giant moves 200 Macs out of the cloud, saves $2.4 million

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: ...unless you have no other option

But do they really need 200 Mac servers to build their apps? If they're running CB/CI they'd still need a handful at most.

So what are they doing with the 195 remaining Macs? It seems to me they've built a cross for their own back somehow.

Lenovo puts the 'cloud' in cloud computing, proposes mid-air datacenters

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

Wasting money on prototyping mid-air data centres

For when you do have money you to waste but you don't have so much that you could waste it on prototyping data centres in space.

Uncle Sam wants to scan your iris and collect your DNA, citizen or not

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Never ending

It's the Silicon Valley mind virus.

Copilot can replace Search in latest Windows 11 test builds, but it's not a good idea

Dan 55 Silver badge

Ask OpenShell anything instead

It'll give you search results which aren't completely useless.

Trump turnabout sees him re-nominate amateur astronaut Jared Isaacman to run NASA

Dan 55 Silver badge

I guess this means Trump is friends with Musk again and Isaacman's appointment will last until he falls out with Musk again.

Amazon complains that Perplexity's agentic shopping bot is a terrible customer

Dan 55 Silver badge
WTF?

Another of Amazon’s concerns appears to be that Comet's AI agent may purchase products other than those the e-commerce giant’s personalized product recommendations suggest.

So what? Not everyone wants to buy Amazon Basics (ripped off of best sellers and promoted by Amazon).

Developer puts Windows 7 on a crash diet, drops it to down to 69 MB

Dan 55 Silver badge

If it were really modularised, the Xbox team wouldn't be talking so long to produce a stripped-down version of Windows.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Kolibri OS 44MB

:s/44MB/1.44MB/ - even better.

Dan 55 Silver badge

That'll never happen as Windows is about as modularised as a plate of spaghetti.

'What the hell, Microsoft?' Users hit with incorrect ESU and LTSC Win10 out-of-support messages

Dan 55 Silver badge
FAIL

Come on in, the Windows 11's fine

If you switch, you too can enjoy the new XAML Explorer which is like wading through treacle and multi keyboard layout support which somehow changes keyboard every 10 minutes and includes US English even if you delete it from everywhere in Settings and Control Panel. This is four years after release, did it actually boot when they released it in 2021?

Palantir CEO celebrates one cash culture to rule them all

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

Re: People were wrong about us!

He talks big but still bottled out of making a digital ID system for a mid-sized nation.

Dan 55 Silver badge

"The company, named for an Elvish video conferencing system hacked by the evil Sauron in The Lord of the Rings"

Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

Gullible bots struggle to distinguish between facts and beliefs

Dan 55 Silver badge

You and I know that LLMs understand and reason as much as a mobile phone keyboard autocorrect, but I suppose research about gullible bots is necessary to try and persuade gullible people.

Labor organizers accuse Rockstar Games of 'ruthless act of union busting' after layoffs

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Labour

It's only the very first word in the article... about the UK. And Canada, who also spell "Labour" properly, although the Canada part of the story isn't covered here.

From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world

Dan 55 Silver badge

The Royal Society didn't take over government functions, they just provided advice to the government. And in any case not all puritans came from the UK, federal laws in the US were very nearly printed in German as well as English.

In 1660 when England reinstated Christmas during the Restoration (the Royals knew that bread and circuses was important), Boston didn't celebrate it until the mid 19th Century because of the Puritans didn't hold with any of that debauchery. The American Restoration Movement also had several Christian factions which didn't celebrate Christmas, and that's well after the founding fathers declared independence (and the founding fathers didn't really do a good job of the constitution either, it's been bulldozed in less than a year).

Oh, and that lack of holidays and workers rights? The Puritans again.

Please enjoy your modern-day Christian Nationalism. On second thoughts enjoyment probably won't be allowed either.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Somewhat expected of a country populated by religious nutters 400 years ago who were thrown out of Europe because nobody could stand them. The crazy never really goes away.

White House says China to lift rare earth export bans, stop probes into US tech companies

Dan 55 Silver badge
Pirate

2TB... will be useful “for backing up WhatsApp”

And training Gemini on unencrypted WhatsApp database backups (most of them). Nothing's free.

International Criminal Court kicks Microsoft Office to the curb

Dan 55 Silver badge

Good news, everyone!

Austria's Federal Ministry of Economy, Energy and Tourism switched from MS to Nextcloud in four months, although Teams is still used for external meetings with organisations use Teams.

Good News! Austrian Ministry Kicks Out Microsoft in Favor of Nextcloud

The article also mentions three other recent migrations in Germany, Denmark, and Austria. Looks like things are starting to move forward.