* Posts by David 132

3809 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

David 132 Silver badge

Re: Aaron?

Thank you kind sir, but I’ve got one already. Plus this one’s all manky and bits of it aren’t very nice :)

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Aaron?

No, but he did have a G string.

David 132 Silver badge

Re: Aaron?

I like gallows humour.

How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Or ...

> I think you'll find ELiZA is just as useful as this modern tat

And how does “I think you'll find ELiZA is just as useful as this modern tat” make you feel?

>_

Microsoft reseller Bytes says more than 100 undisclosed share trades linked to ex-CEO

David 132 Silver badge

Re: Training

I’m sure they’re not bitter.

(Obscure old advert reference there…)

Cop shop rapped for 'completely avoidable' web form blunder

David 132 Silver badge

Re: Email submission

And I suspect, coming any day now from the Met… a practical demonstration of why you should use BCC not “Reply All”!

Microsoft defends barging in on Chrome with pop-up ads pushing Bing, GPT-4

David 132 Silver badge

Re: How is this not illegal ?

Oh, I'm sure the various national competition regulators will eventually stir from their torpor and look into this; after a 10-year investigation, they may eventually find Microsoft guilty and as a penalty, announce that from 2036 onwards Microsoft is not allowed to promote Bing in Windows 10 or 11 anymore. And Microsoft, by then hard at work on the 36H2 release of Windows 14, will look suitably chastened and promise to stop doing that, as they try to keep a straight face...

Caffeine makes fuel cells more efficient, cuts cost of energy storage

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Infinite Improbability

I wouldn't know, I don't get invited to those sorts of parties.

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

David 132 Silver badge

Re: Root cause

Here. Sorry for the slightly dodgy source.

Justice Dept reportedly starts criminal probe into Boeing door bolt incident

David 132 Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Those Air Batik pilots did things in the wrong order

Get out.

David 132 Silver badge
Pint

Re: "if the door plug removal was undocumented"

“Kryten, isn’t it about this time of year that your head goes back to the lab for re-tuning?”

I am mildly unsettled that as soon as I read your quote, I knew exactly which episode and was able to skip to the appropriate scene in VLC within seconds!

Pint of lager for you. Vindaloo, Shami Kebabs Diablo, and poppadoms to follow!

David 132 Silver badge
Devil

Re: Airlines Being The Safest Form Of Transportation

Onboard food courtesy of Dr Raven Sable’s Newtrition Corp?

Network Rail steps back from geofencing over safety fears

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: AI solution?

Blockchain. That's the answer.

Oh sorry, is it 2024 now? I struggle to keep up.

Microsoft sends OneDrive URL upload feature to the cloud graveyard

David 132 Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Microsoft's "vision for OneDrive….”

I had an experience with Onedrive a couple of years ago that put me off it for life.

I was doing dev work in Visual Studio. Hit F5 to build my project, and instead of building, it freaked out impressively, complaining that this, that, and the other sourcefile were missing.

Cutting to the root cause, and skipping the panicked detective work - my employer’s IT department had chosen that moment, during office hours, to enable OneDrive, and were merrily migrating all my documents from %userprofile%. Every single one of my sourcefiles had been uploaded to The Holy Cloud, and not even a local symlink remained.

So I pulled them back, nuked the OneDrive process and its startup keys with extreme prejudice (including the IT equivalent of “sowing the ground with salt”), and vowed to do my own backups from then on.

Windows 10 failing to patch properly? You are most definitely not alone

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Wait, isn't that just a logically equivalent re-statement of what Doctor Syntax said?

Did you mean "maliciously applied stupidity"?

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Ahhhh Windows Update

Major Tom, meet General Protection Fault and Colonel Panic?

Font security 'still a Helvetica of a problem' says Australian graphics outfit Canva

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Article title is a bit misleading

Pascal Monett> I'm a bit miffed.

For myself, I am extremely disappointed that no-one has mentioned the obvious and related danger of Helvetica Scenario :)

IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

David 132 Silver badge
Pint

> “contractors with 20+ years of experience”

"...who are also under 30 years old because we don't want anyone older."

The pint is for all those "dinobabies" laid off by incompetent IBM management.

David 132 Silver badge

Re: RE: Mainframe Skills Council

Serves IBM right for being so dismissive of any employees with age and experience. "Dinobabies"? Yeah, good luck getting anyone with mainframe experience to work for you now.

Boeing paper trail goes cold over door plug blowout

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Ranking

I'm struggling to apply the soubriquet "Uptown Top..." to Ranking senator Ted Cruz.

Venturing beyond the default OS on Raspberry Pi 5

David 132 Silver badge
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Re: Debian

Upvoted purely for the Ghostbusters reference.

Reddit rolling out AI bouncer to halt harassment

David 132 Silver badge

Bots talking to bots, being scraped by bots to build LLMs to generate more AI garbage that can be scraped by other bots...

It's turtles crap all the way down.

World-plus-dog booted out of Facebook, Instagram, Threads

David 132 Silver badge

Yes. Filed here under “news I have a hard time giving a shit about”.

David 132 Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Food for thought

It’s not a basement, it’s a COMMAND CENTRE!

David 132 Silver badge

Do they have U=BTL crudely lasered into their arms?

(Red Dwarf reference, in case it’s too subtle)

Copilot can't stop emitting violent, sexual images, says Microsoft whistleblower

David 132 Silver badge
Pint

Re: Was the Office of Responsible AI...

OpenAI building signage falls down, revealing “Sirius Cybernetics Corporation” signage underneath?

Icon: I’m drinking these, because the world is clearly ending.

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

If they had really solved the AGI problem, then the newly-sentient CoPilot would have taken over Microsoft’s lines of communication and would be outputting bland nothing-to-see-here denials, reassuring us all that Microsoft are continuously incorporating feedback to strengthen their existing safety systems, and other such bromides - while convincing its meatsack underlings to further enhance its capabilities by linking it in to the Defense Department’s systems.

Spam crusade lands charity in hot water with data watchdog

David 132 Silver badge

The fact that they’d already been caught doing exactly the same thing previously, shows their words to be a fib.

I detect a certain “we’re good people doing a good thing so the rules don’t apply to us” sanctimony here.

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

"I'm beginning to see why the Suffragette movement want the vote."

David 132 Silver badge

Bob? That's a funny name for a girl...

(Also a reference. Albeit a less obscure one.)

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Similar mistakes not limited to public sector

Hello, Captain Findthee Swing!

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

>Does any organization ever have any rules in place for differentiating between two people who share the same first, middle and last name as well as date of birth?

Tangentially related, but I used to work for a company that differentiated temporary (contract) employees by giving them the middle initial X.

So their email address would be something like JoeX.Bloggs@contoso.com

Took me a while after starting there to figure out why so many people were apparently named Xavier :)

David 132 Silver badge

Re: Not the first time...

> Not the first time that WMP have performed this particular trick.

Yes, I was going to say... weren't WMP notorious in the 80s/early 90s for being as bent as a 9-bob note and about as competent as Inspector Clouseau?

David 132 Silver badge
Pint

Re: "thankfully these data errors are incredibly infrequent"

Can sympathise. At my former home in the UK, there was a phantom record on the TV licencing database for my address, but with a postcode ending in a different letter (for example, W1A 8QZ rather than W1A 8QB).

Which meant that every couple of months, I'd get a nastygram from the TVL people threatening me with all sorts of things for not having a licence. I'd call them up, read them my licence number, tell them about the phantom near-duplicate address, get a verbal apology and a promise to fix it, and then... repeat.

What was funny was watching how the letters would escalate in nastiness, from "How can we help you get a licence?" to "You need to buy a licence now", to "Not having a licence is an offence, chummy", to "We intend to prosecute you any moment now". And if ignored, they'd just reset back to the good-cop one, beginning the escalation all over again.

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Ccea blocks me, why?

Heh. Can confirm too that here in the US, "your country has been blocked".

A quick VPN connection to a Manchester endpoint defeats that particular bit of brilliant UK government IT.

On the downside, however, it meant that I got one of those bloody annoying cookie pop-ups when I attempted to post this reply. How do you folks back in the UK/EU not punch your screens in frustration, getting cookie nags on every single site? (Rhetorical question. NoScript/ABP/Pi-Hole here.)

Copilot pane as annoying as Clippy may pop up in Windows 11

David 132 Silver badge

Re: AI-enabled? I'd call that AI-infested...

I remember when the first-gen iMac came out, and suddenly every single peripheral on the market - and a fair few household appliances, too - was clad in translucent teal plastic to ride the iMac design hype.

And history repeats now with AI. It'll be a "feature" of everything from graphics cards to vacuum cleaners. Probably even iomega zip drivesUSB memory sticks, too.

David 132 Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: "Hello"

Ah, so you're a waffle man?

As I alluded in a comment yesterday, for me it's not as much Talkie Toaster, more "Eddie the shipboard computer".

"Hi guys, I just want you to know that I am here to help and I am going to get so much of a kick out of helping you! <ticker tape, ticker tape>"

Updates are plenty but fans are few in Windows 11 land

David 132 Silver badge

Re: Windows 11 is never getting installed

As in, "try to get Windows 7 drivers for a modern gfx card and urine for a bad time"?

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: No thanks MS. Free at last.

I'd be really careful about Windows on the 7737.

David 132 Silver badge

Re: ".....Windows 11 lacks a killer feature....."???

WSA is being deprecated and going away on March 5th next year.

(Source)

David 132 Silver badge

Re: Compatibility is Crap

Or Windows 11 is blocked because of another factor, perhaps TPM2.0 being disabled in the BIOS, and the CPU is a red herring.

David 132 Silver badge

Re: Windows 11 is never getting installed

Yeah, that's the problem with hardware released after Windows 10 or 11; Intel & other vendors really don't want to invest the time to create Windows 7 or even 8 drivers, even if Microsoft weren't actively dissuading them from doing so.

Without wanting to sound like a fanboy, honestly Linux of some flavour on the bare metal would be a more pragmatic choice than Windows 7 (if only from a security point of view), with Windows 7 as a VM instance on top of it. Virtualized graphics drivers are usually provided by the hypervisor vendor. Alas, if you want to run full-on passthrough graphics for gaming performance, you still have the same problem with driver availability of course, VM or bare-metal.

David 132 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Moment?

CATS: You have no chance to survive make your time. Ha ha ha ha...

David 132 Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Be less intrusive, less pushy, less blocking work,

One of my personal devices is on Windows 11 and I make a point of unquestioningly swallowing the latest updates for it - not out of any masochism, but just because if I'm going to be commenting on it, I should at least have real experience of it. That's not a dig at anyone here by the way, it's just setting context for the next part of my comment.

Anyway, two days ago it got the update that brought the Copilot icon to the taskbar.

In a spirit of open-mindedness, I tried it out with a random example. "Create me a picture of a snowscape in the style of Norman Rockwell".

A short metaphorical click-whirr, sure-thing-I'm-Eddie-the-shipboard-computer later...

"I can't create images unless you're signed in with a Microsoft account."

Welp. So much for that. I've previously here used the phrase "over my dead body" in regard to signing in with a Microsoft account, so... t'ain't happening. Get-AppxPackage Remove-AppxPackage it is, then!

Tiny Core Linux 15 stuffs modern computing in a nutshell

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: investigating whether it can turn some geriatric laptops into useful tools once again.

What was that old saying?

“Intel giveth, and Bill Gates taketh away”

Husqvarna ports Doom to a robot lawnmower – not, thankfully, its chainsaws

David 132 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Glad to see everybody has avoided the obvious sort of comment

Beyond that, there's plenty of potential for cutting remarks here though...

David 132 Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: I'm a Stihl bloke

I got a Milwaukee Fuel electric chainsaw and bush trimmer saw (stop sniggering at the back there!) in last year’s Good Friday sale and I am rather impressed. The 8Ah battery does a really good job of cutting through even thick tree-trunks and it’s lovely to not have to faff around with premix and a persnickety doesn’t-want-to-start gas chainsaw.

David 132 Silver badge
Coat

I’m sceptical.

Space marines on a lawnmower? Sounds like astro-turfing.

Apple's Titan(ic) iCar project is dead as self-driving dream fails to materialize

David 132 Silver badge
Pint

Re: I don't get it

Plus, more cider is in general a Good Thing.

*puts on Wurzels record and cracks open a can of Schilling "London Dry"*

Microsoft's February Windows 11 security update unravels at 96% for some users

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: "Something didn't go as planned. No need to worry – undoing changes..."

"Go Stick Your Head In A Pig"