* Posts by David Austin

538 publicly visible posts • joined 11 May 2007

Page:

Intel Capital next into the chip giant's trebuchet, to be shot as far over the wall as possible

David Austin

Stupid question

If Intel Capital really did create $170 billion from a $20 billion investment, and it's not just a creative accounting swizz, *Why on earth would you want to sell it?*

New Outlook marches onto Windows 10 for what little time it has left

David Austin

Re: SOP

Up until now, Outlook has been one of the Crown Jewels for Microsoft: It's a So-So Email client, but as a PIM tool, it's hard to beat with any single app.

New Outlook is ameanic in features, but that can be fixed if they can be bothered.

The biggest danger is what killed legacy Edge; Microsoft pushed unfinished, rapidly developing software as the default, rather than as an opt-in beta; The papercuts caught so many people, it irrecoverably damaged it's reputation - by the time it was actually production ready, nobody wanted to use it as "Edge is slow and bad"

The unspoken dangers of releasing early and often.

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

David Austin

Stuff it - at this point, maybe we should go back to the 90's and have a curated Searchable directory, A la Yahoo.

Or if we want to open source it, maybe it's time for the re-emergence of Web rings...

Post Office CEO tells inquiry: Leadership was in 'dream world' over Horizon scandal

David Austin

At a bare minimum, I want Fujitsu's expert witness Gareth Jenkins up on trial for perjury.

If we can't nail such a blatant abuse of expert witness privilege, then what hope do we have of getting the others with a fig leaf of deniability and diffused responsibility?

Windows 11 migration? Upgrade engine revs up, enterprises have no choice

David Austin

Re: Big if

With Microsoft's overall push for cloud, I bet there's been several interesting and shouty internal conversations between the Windows division and the Azure division over Office for Linux...

David Austin

Re: Big if

Many SMB and Enterprise IT houses are - rightly or wrongly - dependent on Windows; The idea of moving to *nix to keep perfectly fine pre 2018/2019 kit just won't come up as a discussion point for many of them; They'd rather run Windows 10 unsupported than switch OS.

So, rather than predicting a big uptick on Desktop Linux installs, I'm going to say if you're a hobbyist or enthusiast, get ready for some amazing deals on powerful-but-old enterprise kit - Get ready to grab a good deal on your next project box.

Eric Schmidt: Build more AI datacenters, we aren't going to 'hit climate goals anyway'

David Austin

If we had honest to god AI, it may come up with some novel unintuitive... thing?? (Tech? Policy? Strategy? Kill all humans plan?) to stop climate change (???), but that's not what the Large language Models everyone insists on calling AI, or the basic algorithm AI's we have today can do.

And trying to build the ones that can, will doom us (faster) if they can't.

Is this something you want Move fast and break Things techbros taking a gamble on?

WhatsApp still working on making View Once chats actually disappear for all

David Austin

Re: Disappearing privacy

That - this disclosure doesn't change the threat profile; even if whatsapp disable the phone's screenshot option while a view once message is on screen, you can still just photograph the screen. this feature by default has to assume someone can copy the message by hook or by crook.

AT&T intends to quit VMware, Broadcom claims in legal broadside

David Austin

As entertaining as it is watching these two tear chunks off each other and paying through the nose for the privilege, it seems a pretty straightforward case to rule on: Is the extended support services clause in the original contract valid or not?

Anyone brave enough to bet whether VMware or AT&T Have the better contract negotiators?

In either case, I think VMWare have more to lose; suing your customers to Strong arm an Upgrade.. sorry, a streamlined and simplified license is really not a good look.

Oracle urged again to give up JavaScript trademark

David Austin

I don't want to live in a world where the Flappy Bird trademark is forcibly taken, and oracle can squat on the JavaScript trademark for as long as they like, but I'm expecting that to be the end result of this story.

Transport for London confirms cyberattack, assures us all is well

David Austin

Re: Email I sent to TFL last month

100% correct, ChrisC: you explained all of that way better than I could.

it was especially galling as they required a scan of a recent utility bill and a passport/driving license to get the refund.

As soon as they actually sort the refund out (They've managed 2 out of 3 so far), I'm filing a right to be forgotten; there is just no need for that amount of PID to be stored for a simple trip on the tube, and that was before they managed to get their systems hacked.

David Austin

Re: Email I sent to TFL last month

ChrisC got the gist; I gave them bank account details, and they sent part of the payment without issue (missed one of the journeys, so have to yell at them about that)

I resent the fact they want you to register an account (And accept the terms and conditions) for a refund, when they'll happily sell you the ticket without one.

David Austin

Email I sent to TFL last month

Had an un-registered oyster card since 2003; Needed to claim some Delay Repay, so phoned customer services who helpfully pre-made me an account.

This is what they got back:

I’m deeply unhappy giving TFL this much personal information to get a refund on a service that required no ID or registration, and I will be filing a right to be forgotten request to remove all this data once the delay refund process is complete.

I do Not want my Oyster card linked to any account or payment method, I do Not agree to your online account terms and conditions, and I want this account deleted right away, before I raise a further complaint about setting an account up against my wishes.

resting the urge to send back an I Told You So email today...

VMware sends vSphere 7 into extra time by extending support for six months

David Austin

Too good to be true

Assuming there's a catch to make Broadcom favour the extension.

Maybe imminent v9 having more favourable (to them) terms and licensing, so don't let people see them before renewal?

Or maybe they're getting a little edgy seeing the renewal drop-off, although it sounds like they've baked in expecting only the biggest and most inflexible of enterprises to be their clients from now on.

Microsoft's new Surface Laptop 7 has arrived. The recovery images have not

David Austin

Naïve question

Could you not just do a standard Windows install from vanilla USB windows 11 media, then run Windows update to get all the special sauce Surface Drivers back?

You'd think if that approach would work with any laptop, it would be a MICROSOFT surface...

CentOS 7 holdouts thrown a support lifeline by SUSE

David Austin

Re: W the actual F?

It's not brilliant value if you just have a single server, and certainly won't work for hobbyists, but for Enterprise IT (and even SMB IT), $2500 for 4 years of security updates and associated support is certainly not *bad* value and worth considering: I've sold some Dell servers where a 1 year hardware warranty extension cost half as much as that which SMB Clients were happy to pay for, as it's cheap compared to the hardware/license/support/downtime costs of replacing that system rather than eking a bit more life out of it.

HP CEO: Printed pages are down 20% since pandemic

David Austin

Bored students can now enjoy Sonic 2 on TI-84 Plus CE calculators, thanks to port

David Austin

Slowdown

On the plus side, the slowdown may help with the game's first boss, which was So hard on Game Gear, they removed the random ball height on the master system version. One of the meanest first bosses in all of Sonic History, especially on a 3.2 inch screen.

Cloudflare CEO sues over free-roaming fidos at his ski resort paradise

David Austin

Streisand effect

While Millionaires and billionaires may be able to screw the rules because they have money, I have a feeling the negative publicity of suing over a pair of doggos will negate any net gains he was planning for.

now pass some of those stickers over.

FYI: This site claims to have harvested 4B+ Discord chats, today all yours for a price

David Austin

Open or Closed servers?

The key bit of info is whether this is scraping public servers with open sign ups, which is technically trivial but a privacy/TOS Nightmare, or if they found a way to break into and scrape closed sign up servers, which would more be a Discord technical SNAFU they'd have more culpability for.

The second option is basically this.

Quest Diagnostics pays $5M after mixing patient medical data with hazardous waste

David Austin

Re: Quest takes patient privacy and the protection of the environment very seriously

"We take [x] very seriously" should become legally binding - I'm fed up of spokesfaces rolling that line out when it's patently untrue, and would love to see them squirm trying to prove how seriously they take it to a court and jury.

Users now keep cellphones for 40+ months and it's hurting the secondhand market

David Austin

Re: Deep Pockets

I miss the Galaxy Mini and Xperia Compact ranges so much; mid to high end phones that you can hold single headedly are becoming so hard to find - honestly may be a case that the iPhone 13 mini may be the best one around, and at 5.4", that's stretching the definition of mini a tad too much for my liking...

Adobe warns it may face massive fines for subscription cancellation practices

David Austin

Fuck Adobe

I hate them on the quantum level, and deeply resent the fact they basically have a sizable amount of creatives held hostage at this point through their unfair subscriptions, Embrace extend extinguish company takeovers, and just generally being monumental dicks whenever they think they can get away with it.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

David Austin

Nintendo's legal department accidently issue proceedings against Chris Pine instead of Chris Pratt for Mario copyright Infringement and Brand Damage... And win on the basis the jury decides Star trek wormholes copy Rainbow Road from Mario Kart.

Intel's Gelsinger grades his chip flip a hit, but AMD exec thinks it's more silicon slip

David Austin

Is fabless a risk?

I'm not an expert in either finance or fabrication so I may be barking up the wrong tree, but to me, outsourcing a key part of your business like the actual manufacturing sounds like a great idea until it isn't - what if the fab partner pulls a Unity and alters the deal, or they have a catastrophic event, and have to decide which chips to prioritise building?

Capita class action: 2,000 folks affected by data theft sign up

David Austin

"Capita strongly rejects any suggestion that there is any valid basis for bringing claims against it as a result of the cyber incident."

- You promised to securely store personal data.

- That personal data was illegally accessed and stolen.

That sounds like a pretty solid valid basis to me - It's about time companies like this stopped taking all the profits, and passing on all the liabilities.

Netflix flinging out DVDs like frisbees as night comes for legacy business

David Austin

Re: DVDs beat the film

I vividly remember being mad when they advertised the extended edition DVD's on the standard edition I rushed out to buy on launch day.

...then not being mad when I saw the staggering amount of extras that came with the extended version that kept me glued to the screen for a week.

I get some people preferring the standard cut of the films, but the extended disks are worth it for all the documentarys, commentaries, and behind the scenes footage.

David Austin

One advantage with DVD's

Your films and shows don't magically disappear next time two rights holders have a public spat, or someone decides to junk our culture as a tax writeoff.

More UK councils caught by Capita's open AWS bucket blunder

David Austin

Points of order

"We have taken extensive steps to recover and secure the data."

How? Secure, maybe, but you can't recover it once it's out in the wild.

"We have worked quickly to provide our clients with information"

Not according to the impacted customers in the very statements your spokesface was countering.

Until line managers are fined/jailed for such IT mismanagement, this will keep happening - this isn't a sophisticated cyber hack which would offer a fig leaf of defence: This is an unsecured AWS bucket, the type of misconfiguration we've been warning about for over a decade.

Intel to rebrand client chips once Meteor Lake splashes down

David Austin

The current system works

for nigh on a decade, my simple advice for people that wanted an intel system was "Buy something with an i3 or i5" for a standard PC, or "Buy something with an i5 or i7" for performance PC's.

It's so simple and straightforward; buy the current Gen i3 for decent entry level, buy the current gen i5 for standard business use, buy the current gen i7 for gamers and content creation.

And I just know whatever bollocks Intel are cooking up is going to needlessly complicate that system.

BOFH takes a visit to retro computing land

David Austin

It's true, but you didn't need to say it out loud, jeeze...

Meanwhile, in Japan, pet fish run up credit card bill on Nintendo Switch

David Austin

Fun, but Buggy

For those out of the loop, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet came out last November: they've been massive sellers (10 million copies in 3 days), and they are undeniably fun (First game in the series to allow players to adventure together in full multiplayer), but they are plagued with bugs and performance issues, the most serious being the Crash to Home Screen error (Switch equivalent of a bug check) that led to the fish shenanigans (And many, many lost Pokémon over the world).

Nintendo are promising a patch in late February to fix some issues (As well as 1008 Pokémon), but we'll have to see if they manage to hit all the worse pain points...

Elon Musk to step down as Twitter CEO: Help us pick his replacement

David Austin

Re: How could you

Well That's a mental image burned into my retinas I did not need.

David Austin

Re: How could you

The parallels between Liz and Musk in their management styles, consensus building, and short-sighted policies has been astounding this year.

Cloudflare hikes prices by a quarter, blames the accountants

David Austin

The Great Mismatch

Cloud Providers: The great thing about cloud is it's elastic and will scale up and down to match your needs and budgets!

Also Cloud providers: oh btw annual bill upfront is cool, right?

Vodafone's software-defined silicon bet signals a biz model shakeup

David Austin

How does overprovisioning work?

How does this business model work for the chip builders?

They must have to ship the silicone with all the potential hardware features on die; how do they not lose out if people buy the chips, then turn on no/minimal additional features?

Intel's 13th-gen CPUs are hot, hungry, loaded with cores

David Austin

Seems an odd choice for 2022

With many people worrying about energy pricing and sustainable computing, it seems an odd choice to push such a power hungry chip family in 2022

You could kinda excuse it in the top end i7/i9 processors as you're paying for a performance premium, but in i5 land, is a 24 thread, 180TDP really a good choice for what will end up being the go-to business desktop?

combining that with talks of ever increasing clock speeds, it kinda feels like Intel has gone full circle back to the Pentium 4 era, where clock speed was king, efficiency be damned, and chips ran hot enough to melt motherboards (And gave AMD a unique and compelling USP with their "more is less" Athlon XP Range)

It's a long way from the original Intel Core design ideas.

Serious surfer? How to browse like a pro on Firefox

David Austin

Re: At this point

Probably too late to help you, but the -allow-downgrade switch normally fixes issues with failed upgrades, or jumping back to an older ESR Version over the current standard version.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1287075

Amazon drivers unionize after AI sends them on 'impossible' routes

David Austin

Re: Routing

Had Yodel deliver a computer to the Police HQ about a mile from my house a few months ago; Had to phone the desk sergeant to ask if they could put it to one side so I could come and pick it up.

On the plus side, I'm one of the few people that have had the Police help with my enquiries...

USB-C to hit 80Gbps under updated USB4 v. 2.0 spec

David Austin

Re: Oh god

You have a promising career as a Kingdom Hearts Game Namer

Ubuntu Linux 18.04 systemd security patch breaks DNS in Microsoft Azure

David Austin

The DNS haiku is distressingly well used.

It's not DNS

There's no way it's DNS

It was DNS

Want the very latest Windows Insider Dev Channel build? Check your disk space

David Austin

Re: I'm starting to feel a bit sorry

Not as bad as I do for the poor people suckered into a HP Stream laptop, with 32GB of eMMC Storage.

They're too light to even make a useful doorstop.

Outlook email users alerted to suspicious activity from Microsoft-owned IP address

David Austin

Re: poor nan

Outlook account; as in an outlook.com email picked up by her android phone's native email app (a special one designed for older, less technical users)

David Austin

poor nan

Happy but also very aggravated to see this - I spent a good chunk of time this weekend and beyond attempting to secure my 85 year old nan's Outlook account.

It didn't help the night before the sign in activity emails came through, my mum and aunt downloaded a suspicious Google play store app, which I assumed was the cause of it - looking at the activity, I could see they were Azure IP's but I assumed some miscreant had rented/stolen a 365 server to carry out an attack.

Still kept coming after a full account lockdown (Account sign out, new and Unique password set), so I went the full hog and enabled Multifactor Authentication on Monday.

That had seemed to have stopped the suspicious account activity, but now I fear this was all a Microsoft screw up compounded by bad timing, and I may owe my mum and aunt an apology...

Microsoft floats Cloud for Sovereignty

David Austin

US Jurisdiction

How does any of this help when the parent US company can be subpoenaed into handing the info over?

Heck, if it's done by a National security letter, they aren't even allowed to disclose they've been asked for the info.

Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint

David Austin

Exchange

Did you know there's a maximum subfolder limit in a Microsoft Exchange mailbox?

We didn't, until we logged the PSS Request with Microsoft.

In their defence, neither them or us expected a user to attempt to file their email into 5,000 subfolders manually, and by the time we worked that out, the scope of the problem was well beyond a technical one...

IBM settles age discrimination case that sought top execs' emails

David Austin

Re: So goes the crooked world

massively over-simplifying it, but:

An NDA That stops you talking about the product is OK

An NDA That stops you talking about *You* is not OK

Micron aims 1.5TB microSD card at video surveillance market

David Austin

Re: If you want to make your own SD card

"once the demand and economics allow them to hit the market"

David Austin

Re: If you want to make your own SD card

The honest answer to that is the potential audience size for 1TB+ Card sizes is too small and price sensitive to be a viable market.

at the start of 2022, only 0.3% of all SD cards sold were 1TB - Several companies have Bigger designs ready to roll, once the demand and economics allow them to hit the market

Source: https://www.androidauthority.com/where-are-2tb-microsd-cards-3077526

David Austin

Re: LPDDR5 ISO 26262 ASIL D

I don't disagree with the theory, but in all but the most insane edge cases, a single class 40 SSD would have so much I/O that Graphics or CPU would be the bottleneck, rather than storage latency.

All RAID 0 does for most gamers is be an expensive way to double the chance of data loss.

And as someone that's had to do grief counselling for lost animal Crossing islands and SIMS 4 Saves, I can assure the importance of the data is not matched by the backup regime of the average gamer.

Page: