* Posts by Ball boy

446 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2009

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Acer signals 10% laptop price hike in US, blames Trump's extra China tariff

Ball boy Silver badge

Expect increases for non-imported goods too.

Sure, there's not many that don't contain at least some parts sourced from China but when all your competitor products go up by 10%, any vendor with an eye on their margins will jump at the chance to bump theirs by 5-9% just because (not immediately - that's too obvious and will generate comment - but give them a few months then watch the prices tick upwards).

Next, you can be sure these additional costs will be rolled into the products and services the hardware buyers supply to their clients. Sure, not the full 10% but a component of it. Aside from International buyers - who are also at the mercy of currency fluctuations which may or may not hide this additional cost - the person paying the price for these import tariffs is...The end user, A.K.A a voter. Let's hope they make the connection between their emptier wallets and gubbermint policy.

Why did the Windows 95 setup use Windows 3.1?

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Makes sense

Why re-invent the wheel? Far more economical - in time and resources - for them to have used the shell of what's already out there.

Of course, these days, using the Windows Preinstallation Environment means it's that much easier to shoehorn in some adverts and kick off the data-grab nice and early. Y'know, start as you mean to go on and all that ;-)

Datacenter energy demand in bitbarn 'capital of the world' Virginia nearly doubled in second half of 2024

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Hard to track the net increase

Is it possible that, in the drive to outsource compute, the energy requirements of general business' IT has dropped because they're no longer running their own data centres?

I don't doubt for a second that AI has added a significant new load but I was under the impression that one of the drivers for moving to a bitbarn was that it'd reduce energy consumption at *my* site...or is the drop, in practice, so miniscule as to be not worth counting?

James Webb Space Telescope to size up asteroid 2024 YR4 before it rocks our world

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Re: It's OK..

Or maybe the Gulf Of Mexi^H^H^H^H America will get renamed - again - and be forever known as the Gulf Of WhatTheFsckWasThat

Microsoft wants to quit building Army VR goggles, hand contract to Anduril

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You could see the reason MS are handing the project over

"Right men*, Bravo squad will go in from the left, Alpha will offer close support from the right and Yankee will pincer once the beachhead is established. All clear?"

"Sarge? Sarge, it's Tuesday, Sarge."

"Bollocks. Patch day. Okay, call it off: we'll deal with the BSOD's on Wednesday and, all being well, we can fight them on Thursday. At ease."

*Generic term of reference.

Man who binned 7,500 Bitcoin drive now wants to buy entire landfill to dig it up

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Coat

He's a trailblazer!

He did to bitcoin what everyone else should be doing. Full marks to him for being well ahead of the pack on that one ;-)

/mines the one with a copy of 'The dummies guide to backing up your data' in the pocket

Legacy systems running UK's collector are taxing – in more ways than one

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migrating HMRC's critical IT services onto new platforms...has "cost more than initially expected and has underdelivered due to unforeseen technical complexities

Really? A gubbuermint IT project under-delivering and over-spending? That's practically unheard of in the UK. Not to worry though, I'm sure 'lessons have been learned' and all the other usual PR dribble will smooth it all over.

/sarcasm

The irony isn't lost on me: it's our tax that's paying for this particular clusterfuck.

UK Home Office silent on alleged Apple backdoor order

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Re: Reading more about this, is not just UK users affected

One good reason (I use the word 'good' advisedly) for the UK getting access to every iThing account is that it's already perfectly legal for UK spies to go sniffing through the knicker-drawer of anyone who's not a British citizen. Thus, if you're going to force your access into British accounts, it's a no-brainer to make sure you get it for the rest of the world while you're about it.

Once you have it, fire up a big AI model and point it at Apple's servers. It reports back on anything it decides is worthy of investigation (insert a suitably flexible definition of 'worthy') and then you can figure out which of your friendlies you need to alert: US, Germany, etc. Of course, China can do it now - but only for Chinese data and they're not swapping their findings with anyone: this move is a land-grab that ultimately puts the UK on the map as THE primary source of mined consumer-generated data in the western world. And, as we already know, whoever has the data, has the power.

Of course, anyone who knows they have to hide their comms. will be looking to double-encrypt, use alternative tech, etc - so the vast majority of crims. they'll catch with this will be the ones who are borderline at best. In the meantime, anyone else better not post or store anything that they would not be happy printing out, self-addressing and flyposting around town.

Openreach tests 50 Gbps broadband – don’t expect it anytime soon

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Coat

50Gbps?

Most users won't see any difference until xhamster, youporn and xvideos upgrade their connections ;-)

/Mine's the dirty raincoat...obviously! (R.I.P the Paris icon)

Why UK Online Safety Act may not be safe for bloggers

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There's a glaring dichotomy here

Successive gubberments have pushed for the UK to become an 'AI centre of excellence' - who can forget the Musk/Sunak love-in interview? Equally, Starmer's made a big thing of AI companies setting up here and working wonders on the UK economy.

However, there's a big problem here: there's always a danger an LLM-based product might go off on a tangent and say something that might be seen as encouraging, say, self-harm (telling kids to use adhesives to stick items to pizza, anyone?). Embarrassing, yes - but investors can weather a little of that and the biz. - if they're smart - might be able to spin some useful publicity from it.

What investors certainly won't want is for their cash to be frittered away on a legal battle over OSA terms: that'll never generate income, a good public image or encourage more investment. Heck, it might just sink the business outright, taking the investment capital with it. If I were looking to fund or start up any kind of user-facing interactive IT service (especially one with any form of LLM at its heart), I might be well advised to avoid a UK operation.

Ball boy Silver badge

Vague definitions

References to [a] 'significant number of UK users' and the term 'reasonable' allow various interpretations. This means the OSA can be invoked for pretty much anyone's Internet-based service and the matter left to the courts to decide if the case is valid or not. Ultimately, this means it comes down to resources: if the defendant can afford lawyers who can undertake sufficient research and present a solid case then the accused will probably be found innocent unless there's a very clear example of deliberate abuse, intent to cause offence, etc. Of course, most people can't afford the kind of work this would take and will be forced into pleading guilty. While the court will probably be lenient towards a first offender who just happens to fall foul of the interpretation, the 'site goes offline and the owner is left with a criminal record for life.

Big business that can afford the legal research and so on will fight - and an out of court agreement is probably the best outcome because, were OFCOM to lose, the precedent could seriously undermine any future case they want to bring.

I note that, aside from excluding their own government services from the OSA, there's also a clause that states any foreign business can be excluded if prosecution might hurt international relations. In short, we can break the rules and so can our friends but *you* can't.

Mega city council's Oracle finance fix faces further delays

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Honesty with shareholders?

Larry Ellison, if I recall, made a big thing of getting Birmingham City Council as a client during a shareholder briefing. Shirley it is a requirement for him to now make a statement in an earnings call to explain that this 'flagship' project is massively over budget and hugely delayed.

I'm not suggesting it's Oracle's fault per se - but if you go around showing off about it and use it to help put the business in a positive light to investors then there must be an obligation to correct the record....

Welsh woman fined for flatulence-fueled cyber harassment

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Childcatcher

So this woman, when the urge came upon her, had the wherewithal to drop her trousers, assume the position, set the phone into 'record' mode and line everything up before sending the recording to her nemesis?

She either has far too much time on her hands - or an exceptionally broad-minded and forgiving employer. I suspect the former: the latter raises many, many more questions than it answers!

Asteroid as wide as 886 cans of spam may hit Earth in 2032

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Headlines, as reported by the UK papers:

The Sun - Space Rock Shock!

The Guardian - Truss: Labour budget affected asteroid path

Daily Mail - Space collision to push house prices up, warn estate agents

Financial Times - Asteroid impact could kill thousands. FTSE, Dow and Hang Seng down 50%

Socialist Worker - Unions walk-out: "Demands for equal rights to impact ignored" claims shop floor steward

The Mirror - Lady Gaga wardrobe malfunction at awards. Does she show a nipple? (pics. pages 2,3,5-14 and 22)

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Coat

It's going to be okay: someone will figure out they got the decimal point on the wrong place and we'll be saved by a small dog.

/Mine's the one with the well-thumbed copy of HHGTTG in the pocket.

A good kind of disorder: Boffins boost capacitor tech by disturbing dipoles

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Re: Applications?

Aside from being able to make smaller caps, one advantage I can see is better decoupling: the faster you can 'sink' a spike or unwanted waveform, the better.

Ball boy Silver badge

Speaking of caps...

Slightly off-topic - but as junior techs in a long-gone circuit fabrication shop, our party trick was to wedge a big smoothing electrolytic cap between two filing cabinets and reverse-connect it to a beefy bench PSU. When the remote start was flipped, the resulting 'bang' occasionally threw enough material up to discolour the ceiling tiles. Made the office stink something awful, too, but it didn't half make us giggle when one gave up the ghost in spectacular style!

Ball boy Silver badge

Re: Breakdown?

...and why people restoring old HiFi gear (especially) will often start their task by 're-capping' the beast. It's not an upgrade: it's simply to replace the components that degrade the most with age. I have a tube (valve) radio amp that's been sitting idle for years that I keep meaning to bring back to life...that monster has a cap isolating the 1.2KV anode from the antenna feed so even a partial failure there could prove very interesting indeed!

Baguette bandits strike again with ransomware and a side of mockery

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Coat

Payment in baguettes?

Maybe they used AI to translate 'give us the dough' and ChatGPT did its level best...

/Mine's the one with the extra-deep pockets.

Oracle finance system at Europe's largest city council still falls short 2.5 years later

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Projected cost: £130million. Number of residents under BCC remit: close to 1.2 million. Cost per resident to get his far: £108 per person.

For a project designed to help them figure out how and where to spend money, it's become wonderfully self-serving.

The mind boggles. Best of all, I'll wager no one gets to be held accountable (see what I did there?) because that could well question the entire structure local governance relies on.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

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Re: I agree with the majority of the article...

One major problem - and I do not wish to start a fight - is that there's far too much choice in the *nix world. Would that Linfluencer promote Mint? Why not Ubuntu or, perhaps, Debian? MX is my choice but it's a choice based on some boring technical criteria that a Win-user wouldn't care about or understand - but I'm willing to bet that half of us would fight the other half to the death over such issues (read any thread on VI, systemd, pipewire et al if you need reminding how uglypassionate we can make it)!

Then there's the thorny choice of desktop: Xfce is loved by many - but so are a handful of others. To get a disgruntled-and-looking-to-change Redmond user onto a *nix, we - the assembled mob of *nix users - need to put aside our 'discussions' about these technical differences and accept a common entry platform, get behind it and then willingly install/teach it.

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Re: I agree with the majority of the article...

This, writ large.

An OS should be boring: it should allow the user to start and run the software they want without getting in the way or being 'an experience' in its own right - and Linux desktops are exceptionally boring in this regard! Yes, having Linfluencers - I'm so nicking that! - is key. If the great and the good saw their on-line gods firing up a *nix desktop with an-almost throwaway line like 'and I'll just start my Mint box up and show you this for lulz' (forgive my street talk: I'm not exactly core demographic) then I think that'd only do good.

Microsoft's London 'Experience Center' packs up and goes home

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Joke

MS lasted 6 Years? I'm not impressed: The Penguins of London Zoo have been calmly going about their business for the better part of 100!

UK council selling the farm (and the fire station) to fund ballooning Oracle project

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And in future years?

As per the article, you can only sell off the building stock once. Unused property now but, next time, they'll be forced into selling the buildings they still use & lease their use back from a third party - a Council can't exactly relocate to a cheaper part of the UK. Such deals might release capital but they come at the expense of an increase to annual costs. This uplift has to be reflected in Council rates.

In subsequent years, what happens when there's no more building stock to flog off? These long-term lease payments still need to be met but new services and fees will have to be paid for. T'Council's properly over the barrel now: suppliers know it and price accordingly; everything has to be leased because there's less capital available; there's no income from buildings rental because you've now flogged it all off. Predictably, a significant uplift to rates is the only solution. That's okay though: it'll be a problem for a *future* administration to solve so it doesn't matter. /sarcasm

Intel pitches modular PC designs to make repairs less painful

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Cut e-waste?

We've tried 'modular' before: Anyone remember ISA, VESA, PCI...? Back then, it was done because the MB didn't have I/O and so on embedded - but we kept changing the interface to keep up with technology and I imagine the same would happen today.

Simple solution: world-wide, you oblige the manufacturer to take back their product(s) and penalise them for failing to meet set standards in recycling the material.

While that would focus their minds immediately, problems created include the massive additional costs and impact of returning items, as well as the not trivial problem of getting the world to agree on the policy.

Why is Big Tech hellbent on making AI opt-out?

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I take heart...

...according to Private Eye (a British news and satirical periodical M'lud) issue 10th Jan, some Korean users of X are so appalled by the decision to unilaterally train its AI on their content, they've taken to describing "destroying Elon Musk's testicles with a spinning kick" as a healthy and wholesome traditional activity in order to poison the model's data.

AI pothole patrol to snap flaws in Britain's crumbling roads

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Ah. This probably isn't a good idea.

I've just realised: the Highways Act requires the owner of a road to make good any defects in a reasonable time once they've been made aware there's a fault.

It follows that if a motorist smashes a wheel on a pothole, they can make a FOI request for the data (I can't see that request having any reasonable grounds for refusal: a photograph taken in and of a public place? Hardly privileged information). If the information is date-stamped as more than a month old, immediately submit a claim for damages to the Council* on the grounds they have failed to meet their legal obligations.

Watch this whole idea get quietly shelved once someone realises this could all cost them an absolute fortune, either in compensation or firefighting FOI requests.

* The road may not be Surrey's: Class A roads, for example, are generally National Highways rather than the responsibility of a local Council - but Surrey probably won't map roads they're not responsible for

Ball boy Silver badge

Re: Depth measurement

Irrespective of the number of cameras, an optical-only system fails miserably when the roads are wet because it can't 'see' into the water. The Met Office can offer details on the percentage of wet days but Shirley the Council will have figured out that, in the very season potholes tend to start opening up, they can't reliably get data from their curb-crawling?

Ball boy Silver badge

Or - as a cost efficient way of dealing with the same problem - they could have someone in Surrey Council keep tabs on the FixMyStreet website or perhaps implement their own 'report a problem' tracker.

Hold on: neither of those solutions requires buying into some shiny new AI so it wouldn't get funding. Silly me, forget I mentioned it!

Edit: FixMyStreet or their own problem tracker could also deal with busted street lighting, obscured / damaged roadsigns and myriad other issues rather than being a single-problem solution.

BT unplugs plans to turn old cabinets into EV chargepoints

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Re: Yes but no but ….

I suspect the thinking behind this was more about disposing of the cabinet in a cost-efficient way. BT don't need it & it'd cost money to remove it - far better if you can sell it to someone else.

The legs probably fell off the idea when it was realised that people can't generally park near these green cabinets, that the power draw would almost certainly exceed the original design spec., limiting the concept to charging one car at a time at overnight rates (i.e. no fast charging). Strangely, no commercial operator bit their arm off to buy into the model....

GM parks claims that driver location data was given to insurers, pushing up premiums

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Really?

"Respecting our customers’ privacy and earning their trust is deeply important to us," the car maker claimed in a statement Thursday.

A statement massively undermined when you sold customer data to third parties: I'd argue you could reasonably expect said third parties to maximise their return on their purchase.

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

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Re: What is the official definition of

Interestingly, the written word is not considered pornographic content in English law. If the material is 'dirtier' than whatever the reader reasonably expected to encounter then it may fall into the category of being obscene - but 'pornographic'? Nope. Lady Chatterley's Lover was the first of three publications that set the precedents for this.

However, the provider still has a duty of care not to expose a minor (or anyone, of any age, for that matter) to content that is defined as obscene so the OSA still applies.

In such cases, there are three options: 1.) Before showing content, get informed consent from the user regarding the nature of the content AND implement some kind of age-verification gateway, dealing with all the attendant problems of potential ID theft / proving the service meets the standards and so on that this entails or; 2.) locate the service outside the UK and implement an IP geofence that denies visitors from the GB address block(s) from the site/service. Your final option - 3.) - is to do the relocation thing AND run the service from a business registered abroad, making sure there are no British-registered owners. At that point, the company and its offerings fall entirely outside the scope of the OSA and you can host what the hell you like (within the bounds of your host country/bitbarn, etc).

It should be fairly obvious that I didn't learn all this just for the heck of it but I decline to offer a website as an example of option (2) being put into practice for fear it would pervert some readers. A shame: an El Reg backlink would do the site a wonderful service ;)

Debian 12.9 arrives, quickly followed by MX Linux 23.5

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Another MX vote here

Started with Ubuntu about, oh, 13 years ago. No, that's a lie: I _actually_ started with SCO SVR4 back in the day - but work kind of obliged me to use the dreaded Redmond offerings for many years. Carried on tinkering with Redhat and others in my spare time: call it an act of defiance! When I setup in a new business direction and had a free hand, I settled on Ubuntu and put up with a few systemd-related shenanigans occasionally. The snap-delivered Firefox randomly crashing was the last straw (yes, I know I could have bypassed that with an apt-based version - but that's not the point: there shouldn't be a need to dodge around such a basic problem) and I migrated to MX for anything needing a GUI.

Never been happier. It's not been without drama though: I distinctly remember having to hard reset one box - but replacing a stick of RAM was the cure to that embarrassment. Other than that, it's all just been...well, rock-solid stable.

Tongue-zapping spoons, tea-cooling catbots, lazy vacuums and more from CES

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Re: "L'Oréal sells countless de-aging skin serums"

No effect whatsoever? I refute that. For evidence I present L'Oréal's market cap. The products appear to work rather well in that regard.... ;)

Just when you thought terminal emulators couldn't get any better, Ghostty ships

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Ah, El Reg...where one feels at home!

Not only is there a pretty technical review of a terminal emulator ('a term...what?' ask the great unwashed) but it raises 40-plus comments from the readership in 5 hours. Most of which combine comments about *their* preferred emulator being an art-form with a declaration that GNOME, X or just Linux itself is the work of the devil incarnate. I'm just missing references to systemd - but give it time! ;)

Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'

Ball boy Silver badge

Assuming those 99.9% of users already have a PC that is Win11 ready and upgrading will simply be a matter of waiting for the update to come good then, yes, agreed: that's certainly the path of least resistance.

However, there's plenty of evidence to suggest way less than 99.9% of current users have suitable hardware and won't be able to switch to W11. The same apathy with then count against MS: rather than buy a new PC and go through a complete change of system, I'd wager most users will just remain on W10 until they feel they can justify buying a new computer.

All this assumes the user had budget authority of course. In a business-use case, it'll be down to IT/finance to decide if the switch is technically possible (legacy code, support issues, et al) and fiscally in scope.

Ball boy Silver badge

Picked the wrong year?

The Great Orange One has stated that he wants to impose some pretty aggressive tariffs on various imports - I imagine just the threat of that has already depressed the market for foreseeable ('Shall we commit to that hardware upgrade now?' 'Hold fire: let's see what happens with these rates first'). One of two things will probably happen: there will be huge pressure applied via the usual back doors in the hope that Trump can be convinced otherwise or MS might have to rethink their support policy for W10 in light of pressure from industry.

Even at $200/mo, Altman admits ChatGPT Pro struggles to turn a profit

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So hold on: is the standard model is giving me bad answers?

For the extra cash, users gain unlimited access to its advanced voice, o1 pro model, "which uses more compute for the best answers to the hardest questions."

Translation: pay $20/month subs. and the answers you get get might not be very good*. Given that experience, why would someone willingly pay more? Shirley the better approach would be to give the users the best answers but tack on a 'but you can't ask any more questions on your current subs. rate: you need to upgrade' rather than fob people off with information you freely admit might not be your best guess*?

*for 'very good' and 'best guess' read: whatever hallucination the AI can deliver, given the topic.

CAPTCHAs now run Doom – on nightmare mode

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Complete with cheat code support!

idkfa

iddqd

idclip

Ah, those were the days!

Apple offers to settle 'snooping Siri' lawsuit for an utterly incredible $95M

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Boffins ponder paltry brain data rate of 10 bits per second

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What are we measuring?

Surely this depends on what we classify as a 'bit'? Defining a rate is only useful once we've established what it is we're quantifying and I'm not convinced we've done that properly yet.

A 'bit' as a binary state certainly doesn't seem to fit: 10 b/s seems insanely slow for some processing and yet, if we take a whole word - assume reading as the baseline task - then a 'bit' can't be a whole word, either - if it were, changing the order of words as in the example above would slow us down significantly as there would have to be some kind of reassembly process required before comprehension.

Then there's the parallel processing that seems to be inter-dependant. By way of example, I'm fairly sure I don't think consciously about how to strike the right keys in the right order: that's down to a sub-process that's been honed from many years of typing - but exactly which words I elect to use can't be down to muscle memory; if it were, I'd come out with the same tripe each and every time. There's some rather clever time and priority management going on here, clearly.

However, this parallel processing only goes so far: Imagine you're driving down the road and happily singing along to something on the radio. Your brain is coping with the routine processing these disparate tasks require (spacial awareness and lyric recall to name but two obvious ones) and manage the very different timing each one requires and yet, were a child to suddenly appear in the path of your car, I'll bet you stop singing.

Parker Solar Probe sends a "Still Alive" tone back to Earth

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Coat

Ridiculous idea. How would they take any decent pictures in the middle of the night? They'd get the most awful red-eye if they used flash ;)

/Mine's the one with the very, very dark glasses in the pocket.

Microsoft Edge takes a victory lap with some high-looking usage stats for 2024

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Not a name that inspires confidence

Okay, okay: I don't mean former bit of that name. It's pretty much a given that people hearing 'Microsoft' aren't exactly inspired with confidence these days - but why 'Edge'? Is that 'Bleeding Edge' as in possibly not very compatible with more developed business tools and practices - or 'Ragged Edge': something that's barely able to cope with what you ask of it? In short, 'edge' almost always implies some kind of out there, not-quite-as-well-connected-as-things-could-be environment. 'Chrome', OTOH, works much better in the naming of things: it suggests a finished, polished product (it also screams 'new shiny' which is what all the kids want these days, no?).

Maybe I just miss the days when a new variant of something was imaginatively called 'Yet Another...'.

This Ladybird thing looks interesting though. An entirely new engine rather than a fork. Hmm. And Ladybird 'sounds' environmental which might buy it a few followers although in reality it'll probably only serve to further dilute MS market share.

BOFH: Printer's festive bips herald a merry mystery for the Boss's budget

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Pint

"By my calculation, the Boss has now made 12 contactless payments of 100 quid"

I did not see that one: I was assuming there was a window/printer/boss exception coming :-)

Good work, Simon - and have one of these for entertaining us all for the last year!

When your technological ghosts come back to haunt you, expect humbug

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Re: "Yes this is the 21st century...

Oh, I don't think we'll forget how to procreate: from what I hear, a good third of the Internet is dedicated to videos that show exactly how to do that...however, there is a real danger we'll forget how to form deep, meaningful and consensual relationships with other people - because of the influence of exactly the same websites.

British Army zaps drones out of the sky with laser trucks

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Re: Microwave?

Backscatter is the enemy of that, I suspect. While a laser will - to a degree - also 'bounce' off a target, you'd have to be mightily unlucky to get enough energy reflected onto one spot to do harm (human eyeballs not withstanding I guess) but the scatter from a knock-out microwave beam bouncing back from the target would almost certainly affect a ton of 'friendly' RF sensors over a fairly unpredictable area simply by overloading them. Might not break them, per se, but I doubt anyone really wants their kit to suffer temporary 'blindness', especially when there's enemy hardware incoming.

Are Copilot+ PCs really the fastest Windows PCs? X and Copilot don't think so

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Fastest?

Perhaps Microsoft have just redefined 'fast'. A trend they set when 'secure', 'trusted' and 'reliable' started appearing in their marketing!

/sarcasm

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

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Copilot in the BIOS loader.

And you think I'm joking, don't you?

On second thoughts, my money is on Poettering adding it as a dependency for systemd before too long. Holy crap, that was meant to be a joke but even the vaguest notion of it actually happening scares me shitless!

/coat. It's the one with a FreeBSD image in the pocket.

Microsoft flashes Win10 users with more full-screen ads for Windows 11

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From what I read and hear, it'd take some very serious work to make 10 WORSE than 11 ;)

D-Link tells users to trash old VPN routers over bug too dangerous to identify

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Re: Good luck

I would imagine the vast majority of consumer-level users have never upgraded firmware in their routers/switches or similar devices. Most will be running whatever version was installed during manufacture unless the device is configured to auto-update or an upgrade was pushed by their ISP.

Be honest: most people will only ever change the batteries in a smoke alarm because the damn thing beeps. What chance having the same people routinely check their router's firmware?

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