Posts by Big_Boomer

Game, set, botch: AI umpiring at Wimbledon goes long

Something else that AI is just as bad at as Humans?

I'm shocked I tell you, shocked that AI can be just as crap at something as us meatsacks. Sounds like a lot of investment for nothing,.... yet again. Bubble-bubble-bubble <LOL>

Ordnance Survey digs deep to prevent costly cable strikes

The sooner the better,....

but it will probably be shit and incomplete.

I wanted to put up a fence in my front garden and queried the gas/electric/water companies as to where the feeds for my house would be. They answered that they didn't know as the builders fitted those and they had no data. So, I went ahead and fitted the fence posts with 600mm long spikes and,... yup, you guessed it, one of them nicked the gas feed pipe and my house filled up with gas. It turns out that gas and electric feeds are only required to be buried 375mm (2 bananas) deep and worse still they can be buried together and are often not where you would expect them to be. I opened all the doors and windows and disabled anything that could cause a spark and called the gas board who responded impressively (we had 4 vans there at one point). After shutting off the gas feed to the area, they dug down to where I had hit the gas pipe and the electric feed was right there next to it. 30mm one way and I would have been at the centre of a big badaboom! The pipe got fixed PDQ (impressive what they can do) and I got billed £1000 for my sins. I consider it a cheap price since I still have my life and my house, but 375mm is NOT deep enough for something as dangerous as gas & electric feeds and detailed mapping of where they are placed should be required for ALL installations.

BOFH: Peeling back the layers of the magic banana industrial complex

Bananaman ROOLS!!!! (drools?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bananaman

The AIpocalypse is here for websites as search referrals plunge

That's just ****ing HILARIOUS

So, Google AI results have decreased the footfall on the very sites of those who pay Google to INCREASE that footfall? That is a fucking epic example of shooting yourself in the genitals <ROTFPMS>. Well done Google, you created a market and now you are destroying the same market. So, what are your AI's gonna scrape for info when everyone blocks your scrapers because you are costing them money and giving nothing in return. The worlds biggest Freetards hoist by their own idiocy.

European consumers are mostly saying 'non' to trading in their old phones

Why recycle?

I always keep my previous phone as a backup should I have a problem with the current one. By the time I no longer need it (5+ years old) the best offer I get from the "recyclers" is a couple of £ so not even worth the hassle of dropping it into a supplied/postage paid bag and dropping it into a letter box. I gave up subsidising the credit industry years ago when I started buying my own phones and have never looked back. I see adverts for S25s & i16s for £50+ per month and wonder why. I have an S25 as a work phone and it's no better than my personal Poco X4 I paid £300 for 3 years ago.

Brain activity much lower when using AI chatbots, MIT boffins find

No big surprise

Asimov predicted exactly that in his Robot series of books some 70 years ago. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies, and the same holds for the brain. I have no problem with using AI to perform drudge jobs, but using them to pass any kind of test is utterly pointless as you will have learned nothing. It reminds me of the endless streams of certificate bearing idiots I have had to work with over the years. Having a degree/diploma/certificate does not mean much if you can't do the job you were hired for. They used to be an indicator that you were capable of learning, but in my experience they are becoming more and more worthless and the advent of LLMs is only going to hasten that.

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

Re: Bulldozers

I was on that ship. It was a trip across the Bay of Biscay. The ship hit a big storm and a crane snapped it's chains and tipped onto several cars. Our Volvo 145 was pancaked and we only managed to get our suitcases out after they cut the roof off with angle-grinders. I don't remember much of the voyage apart from puking my soul out. I was 10 or 11 years old.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin suggests threatening AI for better results

Disable, uninstall, deactivate

That is my attitude to AI. Microsoft, Google, etc. They all seem hell bent on ramming this garbage down our throats but so far it can be avoided if you try hard enough. I have resisted switching browser for ages, but it seems that enforced AI is finally going to achieve that. I may well be a grumpy old fuddy duddy but I find it just gets in the bloody way just like that infernal fucking Clippy disaster back in the late 90s. Google search results are now utterly useless even if you scroll past all the AI and sponsored shite, and Bing is much the same. So, I'm disabling it as best I can and if that fails, then it'll be replaced with another browser.

Apartment living to get worse in 5 years as 6 GHz Wi-Fi nears ‘exhaustion’

The cause of the problem is poor design of WiFi Access Points. I live in a typical, crowded, English housing estate (subdivision for the Americans) and I can see the WiFi routers for my 6 nearest neighbours on most of my devices. However all of our AP's have decided to use the same channels when there are at least 3 possibilities each at 2.4 and 5Ghz. So, I manually changed mine to an empty channel, and guess what?.... Yes, the automatically managed APs changed to follow mine. Two of them didn't so I assume that they were manually set. Even having only 4 on the same channel has improved throughput so I have left it there for now. Living in an Appt block must be a nightmare. At least 6Ghz signals won't carry as far as 5Ghz. I have CAT6 cabled all of my devices that are easy to cable (PC's, TV, set-top-box) because they don't move, but tablets and phones and such are via WiFi.

Homeland Security boss says CISA has gone off the rails, vows to set it right

Totally predictable.

Ancient Orange and his flunkies rely on misdirection, half-truths, and even outright lies, so they can't possibly have somebody independent and trusted point out their "inaccuracies" can they? I mean it makes them look incompetent at best and downright criminal at worst. Expect more of this kind of thing over the next few years as they dismantle all the checks and balances that keep the USA a democracy. Soon to become the Peoples Democratic Republic of North America if he carries on like this for the next 1360 days.

Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, economists claim

So, massive investment but no real effect on productivity,..... so what is the ****ing point? Other than better pattern recognition than humans I have yet to see a single real world use for "AI". Perhaps it will show just how much of a waste of space so many people in business really are but I don't hold out much hope for that either. Even as a toy "AI" is seriously flawed, but at least there it doesn't really matter, except that people believe it's bullsh!t without bothering to check. Just this last weekend a non-technical friend stated a "fact" that he had been told by a certain browser manufacturers "AI" that turned out to be a complete load of hogwash.

Elon Musk makes another cut – to his time at DOGE

He's full of Russian Seamen?

Fixed that for ya ;-)

Trump's tariff turmoil leaves IT projects in deep freeze

FOLLOW THE MONEY!

Who is making money from Ancient Orange's on/off/on/off tariffs? Somebodies are making a killing from the stock-markets yo-yo every time he spouts yet another pronouncement.

Personally I am so bored of hearing about him and his drivel that I am starting to switch off the news and regularly avoid articles like this one.

Procter & Gamble study finds AI could help make Pringles tastier, spice up Old Spice, sharpen Gillette

Another week, yet another desperate attempt to validate their investment

Oh well, the Tawny Tariff Tosser will soon make it all moot as spending on AI will plummet when world trade slows dramatically.

EU: These are scary times – let's backdoor encryption!

EU, UK, USA,... all dumbfuqs

This is just the latest round of government dumbfuquery. They don't understand something so they make grandiose statements on how to fix it (despite advice to the contrary) until eventually someone either explains it to them using words of less than one syllable, or else they get fired/voted out. As for the anti-EU comments above, you should be proud that a Brit thought of this stupidity first!

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

Re: Econ 101

Spot on, and it is because they are neither Communist nor Socialist no matter what they claim. As for not having gulags in the USA, tell that to the 1.8 million people in prison (0.7% of US population). Oh wait, I can hear the excuse that they are criminals and yet we hear the EXACT same excuse from North Korea, Russia, China, etc.

Re: Econ 101

VAT & GST are SALES Taxes. You know, the one that in the USA you have to add to everything depending on which state you are in. The ONLY difference here is that it is charged at the same rate everywhere in the country (countries that are about the same size as a US State) and is included in the price you pay rather than you having to calculate it yourself. Items are Zero rated for export simply because it is assumed that Sales taxes get charged where they are sold to the end user.

As for your comment about "Liberals", can I remind you about Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, and Ferenc Szálasi, all of whom were Fascist Right-wing Leaders. Being an insane genocidal maniac isn't a left or right thing, they are all batshit mental and need putting out of our misery. Real "Liberals" believe in caring about/for others and helping people who cannot help themselves regardless of nationality, colour, creed, or religion. We have this thing called EMPATHY where you try to imagine how it would feel to be in their place, and how nice it would be if someone helped you, and how you could then go on to help others. Your lot only seem to be able to think with their wallets as GREED is your God! You are selfish and see everyone else as a drain or cost that you shouldn't have to pay for even when you have WAY more than you need. And no, I'm not a "gawd-damned Commie", nor even a supporter of Socialism, but your idea of greed politics nauseates me.

London's poor 5G blamed on spectrum, investment, and timing of Huawei ban

Poor service

Sat here at my desk in my upstairs office, I get 2 bars on 5G, 2 bars on 4G, 5 bars on 3G (with O2). Downstairs I get no signal at all on 5G, 1 bar on 4G and 5 bars on 3G. I only need enough bandwidth to browse web pages and for Google Maps to work, so 5G is of little use to me. The service in my house is so intermittent that I have to enable WiFi calling to get a steady signal level and not end up dropping calls due to the phone switching between 5G and 4G and 3G. That to me is a piss-poor service level and I don't see great coverage or service level elsewhere around here either. If you are in a big city, the coverage seems adequate and usable, but outside a big city (I am in a 30k population town some 40 miles from central London) the service is piss-poor and getting worse. The UK networks need to step up and actually provide what they have been promising for ages now instead of whining about <insert multiple excuses> for their piss-poor performance. I don't mind paying more IF it gets me a decent service level, but that has not happened for a long time now despite paying more and more. We pay more for a worse service and are expected to just suck it up.

The post-quantum cryptography apocalypse will be televised in 10 years, says UK's NCSC

Sounds sensible to me

Put a 10 year deadline on it, knowing that the various departments will undoubtedly not be able to complete it on time. Like most such things, usable QC is waiting for a breakthrough that will make it viable. Such breakthroughs are unpredictable but still need to be planned for. We do the same with a particular friend who is ALWAYS late. We tell everyone else we are meeting at 19:30 but we tell him 19:15, so he mostly arrives by 19:30.

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

Re: The only way to deal with Progress Bars...

That works well, except for that when you do that the moment you turn your back it pops up a little message asking you if you are sure you want to do the Update. There is a place in HELL in the super-laxative department for those who thought those were a good idea. A progress bar is fine, but it needs to move at least a little every minute or so. Percentages are like weather forecasts, it's somebody's educated guess but really shouldn't be relied on.

London is bottom in Europe for 5G, while Europe lags the rest of the world

Re: Crap network coverage

It's a Victorian era building that has brick walls and plenty of windows, but even that seems to be enough to block their crappy signals. The problem seems to me to be that they have switched to higher frequencies in search of better bandwidth, but have neglected the need to add additional cells to maintain the coverage they used to provide. So, we are paying more and more for a less and less useful service. At home I have to use WiFi to get a half decent data rate and even to make phone calls. That is a piss poor service that I am paying over the odds for. Having the capability to get high bandwidth is utterly useless if I can't get it when I want it. I used to have the same problem (with a different phone) when commuting on the M25. Calls would get dropped because there was never enough bandwidth to cope with the daily traffic jam on the approach to the Dartford Tunnel.

Yes, I chose my beer and dinner over looking something up online. Not interested in "Social Media" when I am actually with friends. :-)

Crap network coverage

I live 40 miles from London in a typical commuter town (population 30k) in a large red-brick estate and the coverage here is shockingly bad. I have to use WiFi calling from home because of no signal in my house and just last Saturday night I was sat in a pub and my phone was reduced to HSDPA and wouldn't load any webpage. I asked my friends if any of them had data coverage and it was the same across the board and across all 4 UK networks (O2, Voda, EE, 3). The pub is 200m from a major (3 lane each way) road and 4 miles from a city of 200k population. This wasn't some back-of-beyond place and yet the coverage indoors is utter crap across vast swathes of the UK. Outside the pub we all had between 2 and 5 bars of signal (whatever that means) and everyone was getting 4G. We seem to be paying more and more for ever decreasing coverage, when it should be the other way around. Personally I think that the problem in the UK is that the networks here were over-dependant on 2G and therefore never invested in quality coverage for 4G & 5G. Now that 2G is switched off they are seeing the holes in their service and indoors seems to be the biggest problem for 4G & 5G.

Printers start speaking in tongues after Windows 11 update

Do you mean the 24H2 that has so many outstanding defects that most are avoiding it like the plague? That 24H2? <LOL>

Microsoft adds another Copilot hotkey – this time for AI voice chat

"God damn the Pusher"

Well, if MS don't provide a "disable this shortcut" option, I am sure the aftermarket will. They do seem very determined to push their Co-Crappy in our faces don't they? Sad really, as that kind of marketing NEVER works because all you do is get peoples backs up who then create a way for others to avoid your crap. It's like those "interactive" adverts on Android games, where you have to click 3 times to close the advert. All that does is reinforce my determination to never ever use/buy that product or anything made by that company.

The IT world moves fast, so why are admins slow to upgrade?

Upgrade cycle

Most Admins I know (and myself when I was an Admin) tend to upgrade the OS, and back-office software like SQL Server and Exchange, when they replace their hardware. From what I have seen the same seems to hold for VMs as well. If we jumped every time MS released a new whatever we'd have to learn to bloody levitate, so we ignore the marketing blather and stick to our renew cycle. About the only time that anything gets upgraded outside the renew cycle is when a new feature in, or new version of, whatever software our users are running requires a later version of whatever. Most software I know and use can happily run on 15 year old versions of SQL Server and really don't need the latest whiz-bang version. We don't run it on versions that old, but that is mostly to maintain support. Sorry MS, but no matter what your marketers, management or shareholders think, none of us give a crap about your margins or dividends. Our job is to provide a reliable service to our users, and more often that not your software (and especially your Updates) are the cause of what little unreliability slips past us.

Copilot+ PCs? Customers just aren't buying it – yet

OhNO! Nobody is buying what we are selling!

And the reason for that is that it is A) Overpriced, B) Not what people want, and C) Full of Bloatware crap that we have to spend hours disabling or uninstalling. I looked at buying a new PC late last year and concluded that I simply didn't want to be paying £2k for a 2nd-tier PC (CPU and GFX card both released over 12 months ago).

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

Separation is vital, or burnout swiftly follows!

Before I figured out to keep work and home life (and mobile phones) separate, I spent 3 consecutive weekends in customer server rooms up to my eyeballs in messed up SQL DBs. The following weekend the expected call came at 07:30 on the Saturday but I was at my sisters house at the other end of the country and was physically unable to help so someone else got dragged in. On Monday morning I was called in to the company owners office and before he started in on me I slapped an envelope on his desk. He angrily asked me what that was so I told him it was my resignation. That shocked him out of his impending tirade and set him right back on his heels. When he asked me why, I let rip with my tirade and to be fair he listened to it all. He then calmly told me he couldn't understand why I wasn't willing to work myself to the bone when all the other consultants were quite happy to work evenings and weekends. Turns out they all got share-bonuses, but because I had come up the hard way (via tech-support) I was not in the bonus scheme nor was I earning ANYWHERE near what the others were on despite doing the same job and doing it better (hence me getting called EVERY time the shit hit the fan!). He asked me to take my resignation back and I did, but the offer they made me 2 weeks later was still nowhere near what the others were getting, so I resigned, started a new job the day after I left and never looked back. Their loss.

Since then I have never allowed any employer to take the piss. Some have tried and have received the "Sorry, I am 200 miles from home riding my motorcycle", or "Sorry, I have to take my partner to hospital" type of excuses (some real, some not). I am happy to work extra hours and am flexible with evening and weekend work, but I get time off in lieu for all extra hours worked and flexibility if I need time off during the week in return. Now I am only ever "on call" by pre-arrangement and for a limited period only.

Humans brought the heat. Earth says we pay the price

You seem to have ranted against something I didn't say, or rather you picked on one tiny part of what I wrote and went down the rabbit hole after that. I have never suggested that we go back to the Stone Age or any such bullshit. What I believe is our species only chance of long term survival is to start to manage our reproduction. A lack of growth does NOT mean going backwards in terms of standard of living. At the moment if we continue to fuck up where we live, we don't have anywhere else we can move to. Perhaps the human race deserves what is coming. As a species we certainly seem to like shitting in our own backyard.

Rapid cooling is easy. A minor volcanic eruption can and regularly does just that. A major eruption could cause a 10 year freeze. Krakatoa caused a worldwide cooling for a few years.

Greenland was named that way in the hopes of attracting more settlers, not because it was actually green. It probably was green about 2.5 million years ago if the tectonic plates move the way we currently believe they do because back then it was a lot farther from the North Pole.

As for the warming of the planet, some places are cooling others are warming, but averaged across the whole planet it is warming.

I don't "know" anything. I research and I check and I doubt and I research again and sometimes I change my view when the facts contradict what I previously thought. That is how science works. It's not a belief system or a religion. It constantly evolves and changes as new information comes to light.

The planet is warming up - fact! There are over 8.2 Billion humans on the planet - fact! There were 1.6 Billion humans in 1900 - fact! Since 1900 the planets average temperature has risen pretty much in line with population growth. Unfortunately our "economies" are based on population so the constant push for "growth" means more and more people. In the long term that is unsustainable regardless of whether we manage to get the current temperature rises under control or not and regardless of the method of temperature control. The fundamental problem is TOO MANY PEOPLE but everyone puts their fingers in their ears or changes the subject whenever that is mentioned.

As for those who cite geological temperature changes, most of those changes happened gradually over tens of thousands or millions of years, not over the mere 275 years since the start of the Industrial Revolution and the accompanying population explosion.

UK biz dept overspent by £208M prepping to pay workers hurt in Post Office IT scandal

Re: Porridge time

You forgot the Civil Servants and Politicians who helped cover this obscene scandal up, and those who are dragging it out right now!

And why has there been a £208M "overspend" when they haven't even spent that much compensating most of the (Sub)Postmasters yet. W.t.f. is that money being spent on? That "overspend" would have paid £270,000 to each of the 768 wrongly convicted but as usual the corrupt establishment are all covering each others backs, making themselves a nice little pile in the process, and we get to foot the bill.

Dell ends hybrid work policy, demands return-to-office despite remote work pledge

Fine by me.

Before Covid I was already WFH 3 days per week so I just switched to 5 days. My productivity (measured) went up by 50% in the following year and I now have a permanent WFH contract. Yes, there are undoubtedly people who coast when WFH but those same people also coast when in the office. If manglement fails to deal with those people regardless of where they work from, then that is a manglement failure, not a WFH problem. There is no reason why WFH/Hybrid working practices can't be made to work if the managers get with the times. My manager handles a team of 11 people in 7 different countries with no problems and only a couple of us are in an office at all regularly. We collaborate very well, both within our team, and with the rest of the company, but then our company is spread across the world so we have always been forced to collaborate remotely and work flexibly as it's difficult to get California, UK, and China on the same video conference if nobody is willing to work outside their regular hours. It can be made to work if there is a will to make it work.

Lots of jobs require you to be in an office, but if you spend most of your day at a desk, then chances are your job could easily be done remotely. In my experience most of those who argue against remote working are those who are stuck in the past and just want everything to "go back to how it was". Well, the world has changed and it will undoubtedly change again, but it will never "go back to how it was".

WFH with privacy? 85% of Brit bosses snoop on staff

No real change

Office based manglement were always obsessed with time-keeping and work hours, to the point that people used to constantly tell anyone who would listen just how many hours they had worked this week, presumably in the hope that they would be believed/promoted. More often than not, those bragging about their "hours" were the least productive. I used to take great pleasure in informing them that I managed to achieve way more than them whilst working only 40 hours per week, so perhaps they needed to improve their efficiency. It worked well as pretty soon all of them stopped mentioning their work time anywhere near me. :) We also all know/knew those who could "appear" busy in the office and it's no different in the WFH era.

It's all down to competent management. The incompetents blame WFH, Hybrid working, and time-keeping (unless you NEED to be available for certain times). The competent managers look at work completed and value added to the product and to the company.

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

Re: Transportation

They charge the SuperCaps at each tram stop using an overhead rail and a raisable commutator, then use the stored energy to get to the next stop. Clever system but I imagine the SuperCaps lifetime is going to be short given how they are used. Personally I would design the commutator to stay up and design the overhead rail at each tram stop with a taper to pickup the commutator. Raising and lowering it constantly is going to wear out the mechanism rapido!

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

Time waster

Adding all this "AI" crap everywhere just wastes time as we now have to work around the huge piles of shite that are being forced on us. Yes, it has a uses but that doesn't mean I want to use it. If a company invested heavily in it and is now struggling to make any money from it, my advice is to swallow your losses and move on. It's never going to make you any money so all you are doing is pissing more money down the drain. Enshitification is the the appropriate term because they are adding shit to everything.

I have no problems with "AI" apart from it's severely misleading name. In the end it's a just tool and people like to choose the tools they use and really, REALLY HATE being forced to use specific tools.

Copilot invades Microsoft 365 Personal and Family for an extra three bucks a month

Re: $3/month?

Thanks Mike, just changed to the Classic myself.

I find it hilarious that MS think that £25 per year is what their AI is worth.

If they reduced my subscription cost by that much I still would not want to use it.

FCC net neutrality rules dead again as appeals court sides with Big Telco

Re: Follow the money

Greedom!! There fixed that for ya ;-)

LA deputies dogged by New Year date glitch in patrol car PCs

Stupid date order?

Oh dear, did the USA's stupid "bass-ackward" date order cause a problem with their software? That makes a change from it being a problem for everyone else in the world. Having worked in software support for decades I have had to deal with issues with date order in just about every piece of software I have supported, and every single time it was because a coder wrote the code for US date structure and failed to consider anywhere else in the world where we use LOGICAL date structures.

US airspace closures, lack of answers deepen East Coast drone mystery

I for one,.....

would like to be the first tell our wannabe Alien Overlords to **** off. Just because their Lizard in a Human Suit has bought the ear of Ancient Orange does not mean that they can do whatever they like,... at least not yet. As for the hysteria over this,.... dumbfuqs gonna dumbfuq <sigh>

You're so bad at recycling, this biz built an AI to handle it for you

SIX!!!!

We have SIX bloody recycling bins here and we have to pay extra for the 6th one (garden waste) as it is no longer included in the Council Tax that we pay. Black wheelie bin for general waste, a blue bag for cardboard/paper, a white bag for metal/plastic, an orange box for glass, small green bin for food waste, and the green wheelie bin for garden waste. The blue & white bags do not seal effectively so we have wind-blown plastic and paper everywhere on collection day, the black bin is mostly empty, and we don't use enough glass to warrant putting the orange bin out most of the time. The local council has decided that the blue & white will be replaced by plastic single use bags next year but the rest is staying the same.

As for the packaging problems, talk to the fucking manufacturers of it. If they can't make packaging that can be recycled simply with minimal waste, then they should not be allowed to sell their products. That'll soon motivate them. Don't fine them as they just raise their prices when that happens. I recently bought an M.2 SSD and it came in a cardboard box that contained plastic and card inserts, had plastic shrink-wrap on the outside, and the whole was delivered in another cardboard box with a smile on the side. The amount of waste that went into recycling outweighed the SSD by at least 5 to 1.

I am all for anything that can reduce the sorting at home, just so I can have less bloody bags/boxes/bins to store and deal with.

Mysterious outbreak with high fatality rate in the DRC could imperil tech supply chains

The biggest danger from Covid19 was not it's fatality rate (although that was bad enough), but the transmission medium (airborne) and the incubation period (2 to 14 days) before you experienced symptoms. During that period you were infectious but not sick. That meant that it was spread right across the planet before we could even start to control it. THAT was the reason they wanted everyone to wear masks, to prevent YOU from infecting everyone else whether you were showing symptoms or not. Even now I hear comments from stoopids about how the masks would not protect THEM.<sigh>

If whatever this is has a similar incubation period but has a 4x higher death rate then it could kill 4x as many as Covid19 did (estimated at 7 Million world-wide directly by Covid19 or nearly 15million in Excess Deaths) or more. If it's another airborne virus like Covid19, let's hope it has a nice short incubation period so can't spread too far, although from what I can see online this may be a known disease as the deaths seem to be linked to severe malnutrition in children.

Unfortunately these outbreaks will happen more and more often as the world population grows and global travel gets easier and easier. Hopefully our progress in developing vaccines and cures will keep pace with that, and if it doesn't then at least the pandemic deniers and anti-vaxxers will be a self limiting problem.

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

Put it in charge of Xitter moderation?

That way all the Xit is on one basket and the rest of us can ignore it and get on with our lives.

Windows 11 market share falls despite Microsoft ad blitz

And Win10 it will remain...

...until I replace my PC with a new one and if that means no updates then so be it. I have looked at all the Linux flavours I can be bothered to check and there is still very little gaming support unless you are willing to fiddle and tweak and sacrifice your firstborn to the Great God Linus. Yes, despite YEARS of faffing about and hundreds of variants Linux is still a PITA to setup if you want to play games and I just can't be arsed. Maybe I'll take another look in a few years when they have sorted out the mess and have a straight forward install that just works, or maybe the games companies will release Linux variants of the games I want to play.

Microsoft reboots Windows Recall, but users wish they could forget

Week old article still on the front page?

C'mon Reg, bored of seeing this "pinned" article now. I also don't understand why an article needs to be in the headline and elsewhere on the front page, sometimes twice. Very poor layout design.

Trump tariffs transform into bigger threats for Mexico, Canada than China

Here we go again

Another 4 years of daily bloviation via Twatter/Xitter/Whatever by Ancient Orange. I'm already bored of it and he isn't even Prez yet. Any chance that El Reg can resist echoing His Greatness's pronouncements so we can have just one news source that isn't plastered in bluster, meaningless drivel, and utter bullshit?

EU buyers still shunning pure electric vehicles, prefer hybrids

Re: Plug in hybrids

Sorry, but I disagree vehemently. In recent rental of an MG HS it's "lane assist" repeatedly tried to push me into the side of a truck because it wanted me to drive between the white lines even though we were in a roadworks section and I was following the clearly marked red dashed lines. Luckily I could override it by physically manhandling the car, but it is REALLY unsettling when the car takes over like that and I F***ING HATE IT! It constantly triggered it's speed warning at 65Mph (indicated) which due to car speedo inaccuracies was actually 62Mph on my personal SatNav. On a section of the A1 it suddenly slowed the car for no obvious reason, but I suspect that there were roadworks there for a while and it probably didn't know that they were finished. On another occasion it decided I was too close to the car in front, (which was actually a windswept piece of cardboard) and braked sharply. These systems also lead incompetent drivers to rely on them and when they go wrong the incompetents don't know what to do because they don't know how to drive without them.

I am all for self-driving cars if they ever get them working reliably and safely, but these half-way house gadgets are a hazard and I will NEVER buy a car fitted with them, nor will I ever again be renting a car fitted with them, unless they can be PERMANENTLY disabled.

As for the "everything on a dashboard tablet" what a load of shite those systems are. Want to lower the air-con 1°C? Requires 5 button pushes just to get to the air-con menu and for all of that time I was not looking at the road ahead.

AI Jesus is ready to dispense advice from a booth in historic Swiss church

Re: The Baiby Jaisus

Yer right Paul, the Church is already good at doing both of those itself. <LOL>

The Baiby Jaisus

I wonder how long before it gets pulled because it either starts using really foul language, or else persuading the devout that they have wasted their lives?

Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive

Bubble? BUBBLE!!!

Yet another load of hype for something most of us have little use for, yet they invested billions in it and need to recoup their costs, so we get even more hype, and the bubble grows and grows until POP! I see uses for LLMs in image analysis and data mining but whatever they do needs to be checked by other means because they are untrustworthy, and yes, so are humans. I REALLY wish that the marketing idiots would stop using the term AI because it isn't and never has been Intelligent. Perhaps it actually means Artificially Incompetent? I am currently in the market to replace my home/gaming PC and I actively avoid any that even mention AI because they have obviously bought into the hype and I will be paying over the odds for something I don't want. I already waste far too much time CORRECTING my PCs when they do something for me that I DO NOT WANT them to do, just because some muppet decided it would be a good idea that everyone on the world is forced to work exactly like they do. The LAST thing I want is some overblown Clippy trying to "assist" me.

Toyota and Joby complete Japan's first air taxi flight test

Re: Millionaires take note,...

Cars do not need to expend vast amounts of energy getting airborne (altitude requires energy) that is bled off through drag when descending at the other end. However, I was referring to the air-taxi which is a VTOL energy guzzler, not some super efficient private plane that requires at minimum a STOL green field airstrip at either end of the journey. As an example, a Toyota Aygo can carry the same as (probably considerably more than) your Virus and would use around 10Litres for your 246Km trip, but it would take just over 2 hours as opposed to your Virus taking 1 hour but doesn't need a runway nor need to gain altitude. Flying is VERY inefficient compared to ground transport, but it is faster and can be more convenient.