Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

British spreadsheet wizard will take mad skillz to Vegas after taking national Excel crown

Microsoft Excel World Championship.

Hopefully a case of "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas"

Charities warn Ofcom too soft on Online Safety Act violators

And the solution is to have history sites, talking about VE-day, self-censoring that the Hitler "self harmed" in the bunker to effectively end the war in Europe

Microsoft boasts about humongous datacenter on abandoned Foxconn site in Wisconsin

Re: Green washing

Promised 250MW solar plants purely for offsetting don't have to take into account actual efficiency and usage.

It's like buying carbon credits, you just have to be able to report it - it doesn't have to actually work.

Although given the current administration, Microsoft probably have to promise to buy 250MW of coal power to offset any solar energy they produce

Re: Wisconsin - used to be known for dairy and nice people

But the cows and the people still use a lot of water and pollute the air.

Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel

Re: Labor Hire Company?

It's where you get people to work in The Business Factory

Re: Even worse...

And generally that's where the problems start...

Re: "Surely an IT manager should know the difference between Word and Excel?"

>Diagrams are done using a proper application and inserted as images etc.

Especially Excel charts.

You get the chart vaguely readable and embed it in word and then the axis label text is unreadable because somehow Word has a different set of fonts to Excel.

Then you have to fight with word to embed a figure as an image, no don't link it, don't insert it as whatever-Microsoft-is-calling-OLE-today

Re: "Surely an IT manager should know the difference between Word and Excel?"

Which again is a perfectly reasonable attitude to IT

You don't expect the office workers to change how they work to accommodate how the power grid operates, you expect the grid to deliver power. Nobody complains that the CFO doesn't understand load factor balancing in HVDC grid interconnects

"Surely an IT manager should know the difference between Word and Excel?"

Why should there be a difference ?

<whiny nasal IT voice>Well you might be CEO/CFO/CTO because you're an expert in the field and make money for the business. But you see you clicked to embed this table as an active-x direct-wibble object rather than an in-line OLE direct-fooble object, so you can no longer do Excel stuff in it when you're not in Office365 inside our cloud infrastructural nodal-thingy

MI6 reveals 'Silent Courier' dark web portal upgrade it hopes will help it recruit new spies

To meet the UK's online child safety rules you will also need to take a selfie and upload a copy of your government issue ID

French jet left circling while Corsican controller caught Zs

How else do you do a handbrake turn in the air ?

Panda-monium: China-backed cyber crew spoof Congressman to dig for dirt on US trade talks

>Their job is to do what the tax payers want. That's how democracy works.

Their job is to do what the non-tax payers want, the tax-payers don't have any spare change for donations

Re: If the Chinese do find out the American's secret trade position

You think that's the best we can do with $1Tn 'investment' in AI ?

A broken Speak-n-Spell hooked up to a speech synthesizer with a flat battery

If the Chinese do find out the American's secret trade position

Could they tell the congressman?

Because the current policy seems to be whatever the cymbal crashing monkey inside a certain brain thought that day.

It's hard to spy on trade policy when the trade policy on say Australia changes because a reporter asked him a question

Intel and Nvidia sitting in a tree, NVLink-I-N-G

Re: Intel will design PC processors with Nvidia's GPU chiplets inside

Except it doesn't make sense, you can sell components to customers without having to buy a $Bn share in them.

This strikes me more as a shakedown. Nvidia, you want to throw some money toward the Whitehouse's new "acquisition" ?

NVidia contributes pocket change for the world's richest company and the Whitehouse decides that NVidia is allowed to keep making/selling chips

How and why Linux has thrived after three decades in Kernelland

Re: It's quite well known that Linus Torvalds himself doesn't enjoy public speaking.

Microsoft is very good at stuff that Linux doesn't do well but Microsoft's old customers wanted.

You have 10,000 desktop PCs in a company and you want to make sure that logins work and policies are enforced across all of them - still tricky to do simply on Linux

Microsoft might have won on the desktop, it's just that the desktop is becoming irrlevent, and Linux has won everywhere that still matters

Re: Licenses

>The X11 project is nowhere near a big in terms of number of developers.

Because X is largely a finished/legacy project at this point.

You could say the same about Emacs and that is about as GPL as GPL can be

Why Microsoft has the name of an old mouse hidden in its Bluetooth drivers

Re: "using metric makes you a communist"

They don't have to actually take Jugears III

The nice thing about royalty is that they are self pollinating. We have lots of spare heirs that you can have (no, not that one)

Re: "That table," concludes Chen, "currently has only one entry."

Given the number of expensive bits of lab equipment who reported themselves as a "parallel printer" because somebody had copied the 1st example in the MSFT device driver development kit.

I think the programmer was justified in assuming other makers would have put illegal characters in names.

The reason they didn't is probably that nobody bothered to change the default string

Re: "using metric makes you a communist"

>The fact that the only country that persists in using customary units is Murkia

And the global technology powerhouse of Myanmar

Re: Crud begets Crud

It's most of Raymond Chen's blog, but it's mostly programming around bugs in applications.

If an application had a bug but happened to work on a particular build they had to code for the bug so it would continue to work on new versions of Windows, otherwise MSFT would be planned if your app failed after an upgrade

What car maker had an entertainment system that bricked itself if you listened to "99% Invisible" or the radio station had a thumbnail image without an extension

OpenAI says models are programmed to make stuff up instead of admitting ignorance

Re: OpenAI says models are programmed to make stuff up instead of admitting ignorance

But think how much more you can save by replacing a CEO with AI rather than a call center worker.

Since Tesla replaced Musk by Grok there has been a rise in share price, a 30% drop in Nazi gaffs and a potential $1tn saving in salary

Microsoft Surface 7 laptop: Nice hardware, shame about the OS

Re: "Copilot frequently stopped recording"

BMW introduce their new subscription plan to turn off the seat heaters in summer

Probably because most Dell sales are to enterprise where 'everything just works the same' is worth it not to have 2 sets of drivers to deal with

Nice to see Dell doing a lighter longer battery version of their nicest laptop. We got 'standardised' on Precision boat anchors recently

Re: USB C ports and WiFi antennas are not great bedfellows..

Mine has a special FCC sticker which says it is totally immune to all forms of electrical interference, while also promising it doesn't generate any

Re: alternative hardware

Microsoft always made good hardware, their original mice were bulletproof, the MS joystick made flightsimulator great.

It was only when they pivoted into software that things went downhill

>Intel variant is better in many ways?

Except for weight and battery life, the sort of thing that makes it a laptop

Small nuke reactors are really coming online by next year, US energy secretary insists

Re: Wright DID NOT say that the US would have at least one reactor online

I'm sure it will go critical very promptly

Re: Approvals for a new design

Representatives of the President met with the protesters - and had them all shot

I assume it's a mistake and once it's discovered that he went to some elite hippy woke university - he'll be replaced by a Fox "news" host or someone who once played a supervillian in a Stephen Seagal movie

Re: "Trump signed another order"

At least he's admitting that this is his signature

Campaigners urge EU to mandate 15 years of OS updates

They will simply do a limited ' supported' version.

There's a bug that affects domain security? The year >10 fix simply disables domain logins.

Your corporate customers all upgrade or pay for support while the legal process is valid

Re: A strong case for two track OS development

Wonder how it's going to be used by Microsoft etal against OpenSource

Debian, hey you need to post enough money into government bonds to guarantee that you will have developers around in 15 years to support every platform that Debian currently runs on.

Redhat, oh you're fine, you're IBM, IBM will obviously be around in another 100 years

Re: technical plateau

Or when the software 'service' they rely on no longer becomes a viable business model and all your light switches, or you car, stops working because XYZ corp took over ABC corp

Re: Just Laptops?

I think the argument is that you can update a desktop with new parts if your old CPU isn't supported

Linux Mint picks up the pace with LMDE 7 and Wayland-ready Cinnamon

a very easy way to run Debian

What's the point then ?

The point of Debian is to suffer, otherwise you would run Ubuntu

Data destruction done wrong could cost your company millions

Re: Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Signal, Yahoo.........

>And what is the "I think we should be told!" supposed to mean?

What if the data that Google/Facebook/Apple held about you fell into the hands if some evil all powerful corporation?

After deleting a web server, I started checking what I typed before hitting 'Enter'

Re: A technique I learnt in Japan

For the avoidance of looking weird, also check that you remove the chain before starting

Re: I make a zip

You just need a slow enough writing disk

UK Lords take aim at Ofcom's 'child-protection' upgrades to Online Safety Act

Re: Proportionaliity is the problem

That's the point the legislation is written by 'advisors' at TPFTAT/Facebook/etc and the main effect so dar has been shutting down small volunteer run child support site for offering advice

Jaguar Land Rover supply chain workers must get Covid-style support, says union

Re: Insurance

So anyone with money in the bank should have just lost it, any company that foolishly used a bank for payroll goes bust?

Even the USA has government bank deposit insurance. In 2008 the UK didn't

Fire up the gas turbines, says US Interior Secretary: We gotta win the AI arms race

Of course a real American AI should use coal power

Re: Why not use the cheapest of all...

Because using the most expensive solution boosts GDP

Re: Fire them up?

But small scale direct linked temporary install only turbines are available tomorrow.

Of course you'd have to be a complete Musk to run 100s of jet engines in a parking lot in the middle of a town - but most of these towns are full of poors so it's OK

Re: WTF does it mean to "win the AI arms race"? And "Existential threat"?

"win the AI arms race"?

= Get our plant built before the bubble pops

But if China uses solar and renewables it will get woke AI while America will get strong(cough) masculine (cough) AI

BAE Systems surfaces autonomous submarine for military use

Re: At last

Or BAe sub out (sorry) the work to Narco Colombia Marine Services Inc and then just rebadge the vessels

Re: In-flight refueling?

They said I was mad to build a steam powered submarine ..... in a swamp