Posts by Dan 55

Microsoft Copilot joins ChatGPT at the feet of the mighty Atari 2600 Video Chess

Re: LLMs good at some things.

I don't know, but boasting and hubris followed by failure seem a good match for management, perhaps why they think LLMs are great and are trying to foist them on the rest of us.

Critics blast Microsoft's limited reprieve for those stuck on Windows 10

I see Marketing has taken over security policy at Microsoft.

Norwegian lotto mistakenly told thousands they were filthy rich after math error

Re: AI Math

Not this time. They were following a manual process.

Deutsche Bahn train hits 405 km/h without falling to bits

Re: "without falling to bits"

I went interrailing in 1999 and Germans were quite uphappy that their ICE trains often arrived a couple of minutes late. I'm sure they'd be very happy these days if that were the case.

US Department of Defense will stop sending critical hurricane satellite data

Re: There isn't a hurricane on the way

Don't forget the *.

Re: There isn't a hurricane on the way

There's a new one (to me) which is FLINTA*. Just when I finally more or less managed to remember the old one.

Re: Sharpies at the ready

This multimillionaire entrepreneur infused himself with blood from his 17-year-old son in a quest to stay young forever

Everything is completely normal in corporate USA.

Cloud lobby warns EU: Clamp down on water rules and we'll evaporate

There's a heatwave going on

They can get right to the back of the queue.

So you CAN turn an entire car into a video game controller

Re: This is the UK

A prime example of US defaultism. I assume where you used "international audiience" you meant "American audiience" because all other English-speaking countries either use the British English spelling or can accept it without having an aneurysm, likewise for non-English speaking countries which are taught British English first and foremost.

Back in black: Microsoft Blue Screen of Death is going dark

Re: "ways to make Windows less fragile"

I'm rather partial to the flat memory model. Near, far, and huge pointers weren't fun.

The various PDP models' memory was segmented. Flat memory came along later with m68k and the 386. Over time CPU design evolved and allowed areas of memory to be marked with different properties (e.g. no-execute) and as a consequence OS design evolved to use these features - it hasn't remained unchanged over the past 50 years.

As for rings, what extra thing or two things would you partition? Two of the four rings that VMS used had nothing to do with security and they never made it to NT.

The kind of security we need today is more about finer grained process isolation from each other with limited interaction between certain processes. As in Qubes OS.

Even if someone wanted to write a new OS which used rings 1 and 2, Intel's probably going to get rid of them soon.

Red is the fastest colour

MS should use red, that way Windows will finally reboot faster.

Tesla Robotaxi videos show Elon's way behind Waymo

Re: Utterly childish elongated muskrat

The biggest risk you and I take daily is getting on the road with lunatics and just hoping your number isn't up. Elon is solving that for ya.

Ahem...

Nov 2024 - iSeeCars study: Tesla Has the Highest Fatal Accident Rate of All Auto Brands, Study Finds

Tesla vehicles suffer fatal accidents at a rate that's twice the industry average, according to a new report.

Feb 2025 - LendingTree study: Tesla Again Has The Highest Accident Rate Of Any Auto Brand

The lunatics are in Teslas, it seems.

Re: Utterly childish elongated muskrat

Starship is not going well however. I guess moving to Texas and working for a Nazi took its toll on SpaceX's engineering talent.

Re: Honestly

Other manufacturers that have got to level 3 (Mercedes) or 4 (Waymo) use Lidar while FSD is moribund on level 2 and Robotaxis need a taxi driver. Lidar is very consequential to the conversation and Musk was very linked to the decision to move away from Lidar.

Re: Honestly

Apart from the Level 2 software which must be drastically improved to get to Level 4, Tesla can only solve it by fitting Robotaxis with Lidar. Which means, if they do solve it, there's no argument for not fitting other Tesla models with Lidar.

Musk's ego will never allow it, hence Tesla is never going to solve it.

The year of the European Union Linux desktop may finally arrive

Re: "This, in turn, means their data and meta-information will be kept in a US-based datacenter."

Means nothing if anyone in Microsoft 1st line support in India or a TLA in the US can get access to your Entra domain services or data.

US cloud providers are officially poison

With on premises Exchange it was none of Microsoft business who had an e-mail account at an organisation. Now they'll jump right in and mess around with an organisation's admin and suspend a user's e-mail (Azure, OneDrive, etc...) because Trump had a tantrum. Likewise there's nothing to stop them doing the same with home accounts/devices.

There's the real possibility of a country waking up to find itself offline. We've got to wean ourselves off convenience in return for a monthly fee and take charge of our own data.

What if Microsoft just turned you off? Security pro counts the cost of dependency

How Google tracks Android device users before they've even opened an app

Another tracker which cannot be removed once created is the Google Android ID, a device identifier that's linked to a user's Google account and created after the first connection made to the device by Google Play Services.

Another write-up states you don't even need to have ever signed into a Google account for all these tracking cookies to be dropped... although if you are everything will also be linked to your Google account because Google.

There's going to be a new growth industry in the US, paying $10000 per session of leeches and acupuncture. Healthcare companies had better get on board or get left behind.

Exif marks the spot as fresh version of PNG image standard arrives

Mac file dialogs work that way too (like Amiga).

Back to off-topic, Datatypes are great aren't they? Just drag the new PNG datatype into a system directory and all Datatype aware image software will recognise the new format.

But that's an old OS and now we have modern OSes which are much better... oh.

French city of Lyon ditching Microsoft for open source office and collab tools

Re: 'https://territoirenumeriqueouvert.fr works for me"

That's where Firefox's built-in translator comes in useful.

Re: I can understand the wish, but...

Later news:

2023: Munich Is Ditching Linux For Purely Political Reasons

2024: After LiMux shutdown: How Munich is slowly getting closer to open source again

The IT department in Munich has largely implemented a 5-point plan to strengthen free software. Interested parties can still apply for "sabbaticals".

2025: Yet another European government is ditching Microsoft for Linux – here’s why

“We’re done with Teams!” declared Digitalisation Minister Dirk Schrödter

Frozen foods supermarket chain deploys facial recognition tech

Re: Collapse

Unfortunately if the police did return to supermarkets, then it would also be in the form of facial recognition cameras.

Mozilla rolls out Firefox 140 with ESR status and fresh features

Re: Main feature seems to be making the address bar useless

I do hope I'm not part of some obnoxious A/B test.

Re: Main feature seems to be making the address bar useless

On Firefox Android? Please tell me where to remove the share icon from the address bar.

Re: Pinch and reflow on android

Welcome back to Firefox!

Main feature seems to be making the address bar useless

On the Android version - now there's home, tracking protection, reader, share, tabs, and menu icons in the address bar, there's practically no room for the URL.

It was not necessary to make a copy of the share icon in the menu and add it to the address bar...

Yes, I know I shouldn't be kicking them when they're down, but this change was useless.

Anthropic won't fix a bug in its SQLite MCP server

Re: Archived

Is unarchiving and committing a tested fix for forked projects to pick up now beyond the wit of (wo)man?

Brit politicians question Fujitsu's continued role in public sector contracts

"there are no legal grounds that prevent Fujitsu from expressing its interest in this procurement"

And yet we have this a simple search away:

Procurement Policy Note 04/15: taking account of suppliers’ past performance

To ensure good provision of public services and value for money, suppliers with the necessary technical and professional ability should be selected to bid for contracts. One aspect of a supplier’s technical and professional ability is its reliability as demonstrated by how it performed in past contracts.

And if that's not good enough, then there's nothing stopping the government changing the law.

Europe slams online tat bazaar AliExpress for dodging obligation to stop dodgy traders

The easiest way would be to levy an additional €2 duty via IOSS, which has been working for years now.

They're going to do just that, they've proposed a €2 flat rate.

Re: An investigation

Because that's the difference between evidence-based laws and ruling like King Trump who has decided that TikTok is good (for at least a while).

Breaking the nerd internet: Three overlapping generations of tech history – in one selfie

Re: Cutler is right....

So what version was peak NT? It's certainly not chat we're left with today, Windows 11.

The AIpocalypse is here for websites as search referrals plunge

Re: Be careful what you wish for

Google pulled the same stunt in Spain. It took seven years for Spanish media to return to Google News and yes, in the end they did end up paying for using their content.

Re: Be careful what you wish for

Google News stopped being useful for a while now, that's why there are other news aggregators, free and paid for, which are becoming more popular.

/e/ OS 3.0: Slightly less clunky, slightly more private

Re: One more alternative worth mentionig: iodé

That app/destination map/category blocking for internet usage that iodé has looks good.

Re: Time to upgrade /e/

The N9 wasn't viable commercially because it Nokia only sold the bare minimum in "selected markets" to comply with their agreement with Intel, but it received glowing reviews and awards.

I wonder which company Elop is destroying these days.

SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground

Re: very OT HHTG observation

It's still there.

Re: Starship - a poem by Baldrick

Woah! We're going to Turks and Caicos

Woah! Back to the island

Woah! We're going to leave a wreckage

Woah! In the Atlantic sea

Deal to 'save' UK colleges £45M in Oracle Java licensing fees followed audit requests

Oh FFS

Just get rid of Java and install OpenJDK and block Oracle's download site at the firewall already.

American coders are most likely to use AI

Unsurprising stat

once developers use AI for 30 percent of their code, quarterly commits rise by 2.4 percent

Yes, they have to go back over old code and bug fix it. Management of course mistakes it for productivity.

Training AI on Mastodon posts? The idea's extinct after terms updated

How did you work that out? These are corporations burning billions in investor money copying and DDoSing every website smaller than themselves.

Indeed, but you can train one perfectly well on X posts.

A classic crash from Classic Outlook when opening or creating emails

Re: "For me"

What like-for-like drop-in? How many GUI resigns have Outlook and Office had over the years?

The only problem people have is it doesn't say "Outlook" on the desktop icon and in the title bar (if it hasn't been removed) because they'll accept any other change.

Northern Ireland government confirms it did not ask Fujitsu to continue bidding for project

Re: Playground

NI is in the UK and Fujitsu is in Ireland, so you're insinuating that Brexit didn't affect the all-island economy as far as brown envelopes are concerned?

Microsoft brings 365 suite on-prem as part of sovereign cloud push

More importantly

Time was that that a name like Microsoft 365 Local would have got a subheading referring to The League of Gentlemen, but not any more.

Spy school dropout: GCHQ intern jailed for swiping classified data

Re: Imagine if he'd hoovered up millions for useless PPE, or....

Or worked for Doge...

The launch of ChatGPT polluted the world forever, like the first atomic weapons tests

Re: So how can we clean up the AI environment?

I doubt it's going to go away. Google search is polluted with AI sludge websites on any and every topic. The idea is to look good enough to get on the first page of Google's search results to get clicked on for ad revenue. The user finds the page is crap and closes the tab but so what, commission earned. It's still the cheapest way to make good enough content.

US Army signs up Band of Tech Bros with a suitably nerdy name

Lunatics in charge of the asylum

We get to see tech bros sell snakeoil with AI while state-level adversaries take what they want from government departments thanks to Doge being pwned and utility and telecoms networks thanks to CISA being disbanded.

Forget Vibe Coding, we're all about Vine Coding nowadays

Re: vine coding

I find it takes the edge off those Teams meetings which take up 50% of the day so I can ignore the blabbing in the background and get some actual work done.